


Sea Foam

by moodiful819



Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Drama, F/M, Fairy Tale Retellings, Mermaids, Romance
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2011-06-29
Updated: 2011-06-29
Packaged: 2018-02-06 07:08:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 24,437
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1849003
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moodiful819/pseuds/moodiful819
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It was, in hindsight, silly, he realized. A mere fisherman could never be anyone’s knight. And with that, he watched as the waves crashed and bubbles floated to the surface above him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Done for the kakasaku community’s AU fic contest on lj. I started nine days late, so let’s hope that I can finish by the deadline. 
> 
> For those of you unfamiliar with mermaid lore, selkies (from Irish/Scottish lore) are seals that can shed their skins to become humans and put them on to become seals again.
> 
> Inspired by The Little Mermaid from Disney, the story of the same name from Hans-Christen Andersen, and The Sea Princess and the Sea Witch from A Treasury of Mermaids: Mermaid Tales from Around the World by Shirley Climo. Dedicated to my friend Debbie who helped me find the book from my childhood, and the public library system that has fed my mermaid addiction for years and has allowed me to binge once more.
> 
> *Backing up from Fanfiction.net. This one will have the lemon in the last chapter.*

“So wait, you humans don’t eat your catch and instead sell it to people who’ve never worked a day in their life and live far away for small metal circles?”

Kakashi glanced down at the seal—mermaid. _Mermaid_ because today was that one special day of the year when she changed back from a seal into a mermaid—and looked up sighing. He had spent the entire afternoon trying to explain to his female companion the reason why it was important for the men in the village to catch fish. Though she now understood the basic reason, he wished the social and economical reasons behind the fishing industry had stuck because it made him sound a lot more cynical and snide as her teacher when she put it that way. (He was a much nicer guy. Really!) However, too exhausted to deal with another three hours of questioning from the spitfire marine maiden, Kakashi just sighed tiredly and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Something like that.”

In response, his companion vaulted off the back of the rock she had been sunning on into the water and once surfacing, jetted the salty liquid from her mouth and languidly backstroked in the nature-made shelter of the tide pool. “I don’t understand you guys. Back home, we ate what we caught and traded shells and other items for things we couldn’t get ourselves. Humans are strange creatures,” she mused aloud.

“You’re one to talk, Sakura,” Kakashi muttered softly into his hand, ignoring the heated glare aimed at his face. “I’m only being honest,” he said in exasperation as he rubbed the back of his neck agitatedly. “Explain it to me once more. How are you a mermaid that got turned into a selkie?”

Sakura eyed him critically, annoyance swimming in her bright beryl-green eyes as the setting sun set her pink hair afire, making her seem like one of those temperamental fire goddesses he heard about from islands far away. Soon however, like always, those feelings melted away and she set about telling the story of how she became… _this_ , starting from the top as her lids lowered and her mind swam in her memories, oblivious as Kakashi followed along to the story he’d memorized by heart and never tired of hearing.

 _“I was born to Lord Dan and Lady Tsunade in the South-Middle Ocean not far from here,”_ she always began, waves of emotion crashing behind the reflecting pools of her eyes as she remembered her childhood—of happier times.

She was the only child to the king and queen of a prosperous undersea kingdom. Because of her pink hair and green eyes, she was named after her mother’s favorite flower when Tsunade had stayed in the Sea of Japan where she met her husband, and was lavished with presents and the love of her parents. However, her birth-father had suddenly come down with a blood-illness that poisoned him from the inside-out. No one could do anything for him, not even her mother who was a healer renowned throughout the seven seas. They watched him wither away as he continued to love them until the very end. A cloud shrouded the kingdom for two years until her mother remarried a family friend, Lord Jiraiya.

She grew up under the care of her governess, Shizune, who was also her mother’s lady-in-waiting. Growing up, she often snuck out of lessons to explore the areas surrounding the castle or play with her friends because she hated studying. However, Shizune bribed her into coming back to the study sessions by promising to exchange lessons in healing magic and music for math and history. By the time she was kidnapped, she was proficient in the healing arts and knew over fifty songs.

Now, once in a while, her mother treated her to a trip to the surface—your human world—where they would spend the day walking on the shore and exploring. Back then, this was normal since all merpeople could change into human form and they had to practice walking on two “legs” in order to walk among humans, usually when they were young as to not draw suspicion from the land-dwelling humans. Sakura would look forward to these trips the most because not only was she able to spend time with her mother alone, she was also able to eat her favorite food: apples.

It was on one of these trips that Sakura had been snatched. Trips to the surface usually took place within the boundaries of the South-Middle Ocean, but as they were preparing to return to their kingdom, a sea-sorceress named Anko conjured a storm, tearing the two apart. From what she remembered from stories from Shizune, Anko was the student of Orochimaru, a powerful sorcerer who was defeated and killed in battle by her father, Dan. Half of it was supposedly because Orochimaru craved power; the other half, because he had been in love with her mother. After the death of her master, Anko had sworn vengeance on the Royal Family and the trip had been the perfect opportunity to enact her revenge. As the storm raged, her mother was flung back to the kingdom while she was flung here to a small fishing village on the European coast.

She was twenty-six when that happened. To put her age equivalent to a human—because merpeople aged differently than humans—she had been 13. Once there, Anko enchanted her to live as a seal in the cove where the witch lived, only regaining her mermaid form for twenty-four hours on the day of the Harvest Moon. Any effort to escape beyond the scraggly reef that bordered the open ocean would conjure a strong storm that would be too treacherous to brave and throw her back into the cove.

And so, she was trapped in the body of a seal, doomed to swim the same area of water over and over again. She would spend the rest of her days sitting behind the cropping of worn-rocks that sheltered the calm waters of a quaint tide pool large enough for her to stay in; she would never wander the shore in her human form again; she would never sing again; she would never see her parents again.

 _“Instead, cursed to live as a seal by a small fishing village on the European coast,”_ she would finish, same as always.

The rest of the story was something they always left unsaid because they both knew what happened. After the shock wore off, Sakura was struck with the full brunt of her circumstances. Not wishing to live a life without music or seeing her family again, she decided she would rather waste away and refused to eat, even as the passing fishing boats prodded her with their oars offering squid and small children from the village offered her the vegetables from their plates (of course those times, she felt more like a convenient trash receptacle than a creature in need).

Finally, she felt the last tendrils of life pulling away at her body and let herself wash ashore, determined to die there when she smelled something familiar. It was sweet and heavenly and in her lucid state, she followed the scent, pulling her malnourished body along the sand until she smelt it right above her nose. Opening her eyes, right above her head was her treasure: a bright, shiny red apple held in the hand of an old one-eyed man.

The two stared at each other for a minute, not quite sure how to take the sudden turn of events as the seal stared at the one-eyed man and the man stared at the seal. Kakashi had only recently moved to the fishing village at the time. Having spent the greater half of the day discussing necessities with the mayor and avoiding new neighbor greetings, Kakashi had slipped down to the beach by the village to organize his thoughts and recover from the day. Not having eaten since entering the village a little after dawn on the cart of a friendly merchant, Kakashi reached into his traveling sack and retrieved from his pack an apple that he had picked up the day before when he suddenly found himself face-to-face with a seal. Judging from its gaunt figure and lackluster light-grey coat, he figured the thing was just hungry. Unsure of whether seals actually ate fruit— _would the stupid thing die if he gave it an apple?_ —he figured if it would make the animal go away, he could part with an apple, and tossed it a few feet away. Watching the seal follow after it like a dog watching a thrown stick, he waited until he saw the animal start to bite into the fruit before taking another one out. However, as soon as he took out the second apple, the seal was hopping back towards him.

That day, all nine apples went to the little seal he met. Looking at his rucksack in dismay— _nothing. Not even a cracker to nibble on_ —he turned his saddened, defeated gaze to the seal who lay sated on its back, a smile seeming to pull at its whiskered lips. He was half-tempted to snarl at the pinniped, poke it with a stick— _something_ to let the seal know that it had just robbed him of his only food source for the day.

However, the seal was looking a lot better than when he had found it. Its stomach was rounder (though that was probably from the nine apples it just ate) and its fur seemed to have gained back some of its luster.

“Alright, you can keep the apples,” he told the seal. After all, he wouldn’t have enjoyed eating a meal if it meant letting a starving animal die in front of him, and who knew? Maybe it impressed some deity enough into rewarding him with a meal later.

“I’ll just try finding something else to eat tonight, even if I was hoping not to speak to those new neighbors of mine until three days from now,” he said rubbing his hand over the seal’s belly affectionately, letting his fingers glide over the black spots in its smooth silver fur.

At the touch, the seal suddenly sat up and ran close to the rocks of the tide pool, its eyes suddenly wary. Suddenly, it occurred to Kakashi that the seal might not have been used to human contact though it was brazen enough to come this close to shore and stare at him.

Careful not to make any sudden movements, Kakashi waited until the creature relaxed and watched as it inched further towards him. It seemed curious of his smell now, not that he was surprised. He had spent much of his life living deeper in the woods and didn’t carry the smell of saltwater and fish on him. Keeping his body still, Kakashi lifted his right hand up slowly to just above the seal’s head height. Back when he was a child, he would often do this to his dogs to measure their personality as well as their trust in him. Curious to whether it would scamper away or let his hand rest on its head, he watched as the seal prodded the palm of his hand with its nose before landing back in the sand.

 ** _“Than-k Yo-u,”_** it bellowed, stunning Kakashi into pause. After all, the seal had just talked…right?

“I should go find something to eat. I’m so hungry, I’m hallucinating,” Kakashi muttered to himself as he bade the seal a fond farewell and picked his stuff up to head back into the village. He expected to never see the seal again after that day, but was not disappointed when he saw it the next day and the day after. The seal would watch at he cast his net and threw a line behind it into the water. Sometimes, it would go back into the water to cool off, but it never left his side and seemed to knowingly avoid the nets. The day after he met the seal yielded no catch, nor did the second day. However, Kakashi still treated the seal to one of the apples he carried in his sack after finding an apple grove a little way down the beach before going home, having unofficially tasked himself with keeping the seal healthy until it was strong enough to leave the cove.

On the third day after meeting the seal, Kakashi had set his nets out like usual and had been waiting on the edge of the tide-pool with his new companion—he couldn’t afford a boat, so he fished from shore—but rushed home when he realized he’d forgotten something. When he came back, his nets were bursting with fish as the seal stood sentinel over his catch. Walking dazedly, Kakashi watched as the seal collected his catch and dragged it into shallower water. Spitting the ends of the net out to place a flipper on them so the catch wouldn’t escape, it stared up at him with its large dark eyes and seemed to almost smile at him.

 ** _“Tha-nnk YO-uu!”_** it barked up at him from his feet, and that was the last thing Kakashi heard before he promptly fainted into the sand.

Once he woke up and convinced himself that he wasn’t crazy and the seal _was_ talking to him, he listened to the seal’s tale of how it came to be here—the first time he heard Sakura’s story—but in hindsight, it made sense how the seal could eat nine apples without dying and manage to maneuver his fishing net. Peering closer into her eyes, Kakashi could even see flecks of green on the outside of her dark irises. (And if any cynicism and skepticism lingered after that, they were wiped away when she turned into a mermaid on the day of the harvest moon.)

Since that day, Sakura never left his side—something to do with merpeople always repaying a debt. Really, she was probably just lonely, poor thing—and the two became fixtures of the beach. Because he saved her life, however, Sakura was determined to pay it back in full within her limited ability. Because she still had the ability to talk to fish, she made sure he always had full nets, which he repeatedly turned down, asking for only average numbers since he was unable to dissuade her from paying him back. When she asked why—“wouldn’t you like full nets so you can eat a lot?”—Kakashi had to explain to her that by catching that much fish, not only did it damage the ecosystem since too many fish were being taken out, but flooding the market would cause the value of the catch to decrease, which lead to their many discussions of human society in all its dimensions. Though discussions on economics always seemed to go in the same circles, Kakashi did not mind since he got to hear Sakura’s voice grow stronger as she used it more in conversation. Furthermore, he enjoyed the level of conversation between them as they debated the merits of their various differences in culture.

They didn’t talk all the time. Sometimes, they would sit on the beach and the only sounds would be the waves crashing, the gulls cawing, and the munching, crunching sound of apples. In fact, the duo had gained a reputation and as such, there were unspoken rules enacted in their fishing village because of it. Kakashi was now the sole caretaker of the seal, the beach was Kakashi’s fishing grounds, and the apple grove belonged (unofficially) to Kakashi—not that he much enjoyed apples anymore. After three years of eating them with Sakura, he’d grown rather sick of them. Sakura seemed to tire of them also, only forcing down the fruit because it reminded her of her mother. But on days when he had to leave the beach to venture into the capital (a three-day journey) to check the market prices on fish and restock his supplies, he always picked a bunch of apples and left them next to her on the rock to enjoy in his absence, and each time, she would be still on the rock waiting for him, the apples untouched until he returned and they could share the fruit together.

She would lose weight on the days he wasn’t there. Though he had told the village children to feed the seal for him and picked enough spare apples to last beyond the trip duration, Sakura seemed to only take one from the children a day just to humor them before she waddled off back onto the rock and waited for his return by the apple pile.

It seemed that Sakura didn’t talk to anyone during the time he was gone either. Though a part of him was glad that her voice, as clear and pure as a ringing bell and soft as the waning hiss of ocean spray, was his alone to enjoy, it pained him to see her so dejected and lonely. She shot down every suggestion he gave, saying the sardines were too chatty, the gulls too repetitive, and no one else would ever believe that a seal could talk. And even if they did, they might not be as kind and understanding as Kakashi (something he apologized later for suggesting).

Once, he suggested that she sing her sorrows away. It was the day of the Harvest Moon, and he was leaving on his trip the next day (he never scheduled his trips on the day of the harvest moon). By now, he knew Sakura was purposefully not eating when he was gone due to loneliness, and having heard that mermaids had lovely singing voices and loved music, figured there was no harm in suggesting it.

At the mention of music, something long forgotten seemed to awaken inside of Sakura. Her face suddenly glowed with joy and excitement and dragging Kakashi onto the rocks surrounding the tide pool, she drew in breath and summoned her voice to her throat.

She had been so excited to sing, to hear her voice again and not a bark, to reclaim another link to her home beyond the ocean’s horizon and hear the songs she used to know by heart word for word…

So imagine her surprise when out of her mouth came not a song as lovely as a siren, but the sharp, hoarse bark like that of a seal.

Sakura, flustered, tried to dismiss it as nothing—that singing wasn’t the most important thing in the world—that at least she could be a mermaid again once a year—but Kakashi had seen it. He’d see the hope on her face—the bright belief that she could own another part of her soul again—only to be wiped away by a hoarse seal bark, replaced for a brief second by horror and despair. He tried to tell her it was a fluke—that it was only because she hadn’t used her voice in so long—but the damage had been done, and Sakura, with a wistful look in her eye, vowed never to sing again.

Fast-forward to the present, where Sakura was sixteen and Kakashi was about to turn thirty, and Kakashi could see that look was once again in her eye. Every harvest moon, it was like this. When she became a mermaid, when she looked out at the sea... He could tell that she was thinking of her old family and how they were doing…if they were still trying to find her…if they even remembered her...

She continued to stare out at the sea as the sun set further on the horizon, the first stars of the evening appearing in the sky. The light sparkling off the water’s surface reflected in her eyes, as dazzling as any king’s crown, as the setting sun dyed her hair a warm orange. If he listened close enough, Kakashi could make out a few bars of a song struggling to fight past the iron line of Sakura’s lips.

The tide began to come in steadily. If it was anywhere else, the tide would’ve probably been up to his hip, but the cove seemed to buffer the moon’s power in that aspect. He’d heard that the village never flooded despite its proximity to shore, and briefly, Kakashi wondered if the sea witch’s magic protected this place as well as it had cursed the young mermaid.

Just then, something washed up from the water, brushing against his toe.

“A shell,” he said picking up the small object and holding it between them. Her tail flapping against the rock languidly, Sakura took it from between his fingers and held it for inspection, smilingly fondly at the small item.

“Scallop shell. We used this as currency sometimes because it helps bone health. A few more and you could trade pretty nicely with this,” Sakura commented as she turned the shell over and over under her gaze.

Kakashi chuckled and withdrew a few metal coins from his pocket. “That’s why we work so hard to get these small metal circles,” he said continuing their talk on economics. “Believe it or not, but we can trade pretty nicely with these.”

Sakura, skeptical, raised a brow challengingly. “Oh yeah? Like what?”

“Oh…I don’t know. Maybe this?” he said as he pulled a familiar bright red object from nowhere. Sakura’s eyes widened to the size of saucers.

“An apple? But I thought you said these were out of season!” Sakura exclaimed cradling the fruit gently.

“They are around here—they’ll be available later in the year—but they were available in the capital,” he explained before ruffling her hair affectionately, “See? Those small metal circles aren’t so useless after all.”

And with that, Kakashi bid farewell to Sakura for the night, walking through the small forest path from the beach to the sleepy little fishing village on the European shore.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter two of Sea Foam. I realize, belatedly, that writing something multi-chaptered for something to be updated all at once is quite a folly on my part.

“So wait, people kill whales and women wear their baleen in contraptions that squeeze their waists into a shapelier figure, but then make them unable to breathe?”

Sakura’s face contorted with a mix of horror and disgust…or rather, with as much horror and disgust as any seal could express.

Kakashi rubbed the back of his neck, careful of the knot tying the scarf over the lower half of his face. “Yes. Silly, isn’t it? It squeezes the organs too. Not a pretty sight during an autopsy—not that autopsies are pretty anyway.”

Sakura shivered in the water, sending ripples as she bobbed up and down in the water. “I am never wearing one of these ‘corsets.’ They sound like torture devices.”

Kakashi merely nodded. The trends of the fashion world were a frightening thing indeed. As for how they got on the topic of corsets, whenever Kakashi went on a trip, the women of the village would ask what the latest fashion trends were and he would report back to them once he returned home. He had been talking to one of the women in the village when he guessed Sakura overheard from the water. When he went back to his line, Sakura was demanding to know what this “fashion” business was. Belatedly, he realized that while he’d been improving her understanding of language by teaching her reading, writing, and the art of making complex sentences—she had only known simple phrases and words when they first met—he realized that he never covered _all_ the facets of human culture in his lessons.

Not that he thought Sakura needed a lesson in clothing. She knew the basic words like “shirt,” “pants,” “dress,” “shoe,” and “hat,” but teaching her anything beyond that seemed irrelevant. Though she wore a bra made of two shell halves and some twine out of modesty for his sake, clothing did not apply to mermaids. It was more a human invention.

“By the way, Kakashi,” Sakura said batting a flipper at his foot, “why would a fisherman know about autopsies? You told me an autopsy is the exhumation of a dead body.”

Kakashi’s grip on his fishing pole tightened imperceptibly, but before he could answer the question, a voice from shore thankfully interrupted him.

“Hey Kakashi! Quit talking to the seal and start fishing, huh?!” shouted a man with chin-length brown hair as he and the other men of the village shoved their fishing vessel into the shallow waters of the lapping tide. If Sakura remembered correctly, the man’s name was Genma.

In retort to the hot exclamation, Kakashi narrowed his gaze and picking up his fishing pole, pointedly flicked the lure into the water with a delicate ‘ploip!’ Genma merely shook his head and leapt into the boat headed out to sea.

The two watched quietly as the boat drifted out to sea. “Why is he so mad at you, Kakashi?”

“He’s not mad. He’s kidding, for the most part—men will fling insults at each other to bond—but I guess part of it is frustration. They go out and risk their lives to bring back full nets while I just sit here and my net still becomes half-full. Even if they make more than I do, it’s frustrating for them that I can sit in the safety of the cove and catch enough to live on, but they have to venture out and possibly never come back to their families.”

“So that’s why you only let me fill your nets halfway,” Sakura said softly, staring into the water.

Kakashi patted her head reassuringly. “You’re only paying me back how you see is fit. I don’t dislike it, but I try to make it fair. You remember my fishing pole?” Sakura nodded. He carried it with him every day. “No fisherman ever carries both the net and a pole. It’s usually one or the other, but I decided long ago that even if you help me with my net catch, I won’t let you help with my pole. Usually, fishermen will just pick something from their net catch to take home, but I only eat things I catch on this pole. Even if I rarely catch fish on this pole, whatever I catch is with my own power.

“And Genma won’t be mad for long,” he reassured. “Once they’re back on shore, we’ll go drinking and everything will be back to normal. Besides, he was the first person to take care of you, remember?” he asked with a smile.

Sakura nodded hesitantly. Genma was the first one to try and toss squid to her and got all the villagers into trying to feed her too. She felt bad. Maybe she’d apologize by sending a tuna their way.

“Try swimming by their boat when they come in. I think they miss their old friend since I keep hogging you,” Kakashi suggested with a sideways glance. Sakura blinked in surprise. It was as if he read her mind, but then again, after spending so long together, it was often that they could guess each other’s thoughts.

“Okay. I’ll do that.”

“Good girl,” he said before reaching into the tide pool and throwing her a crab—one of her favorites. Sakura leapt into the air, catching it gleefully before falling back into the water; the only sounds in the cove being the sound of lapping waves and the crunch of crab shell in Sakura’s powerful jaws.

* * *

Kakashi frowned as he walked through the small game trail leading from the beach to the village. Though Sakura had tried to hide it, recently Kakashi had heard Sakura humming more than usual as she looked out onto the water. Though she was still traumatized by what happened the first time she tried to sing, it seemed that even if she was unwilling, her body craved music. Perhaps it was true what the legends said, that mermaids needed music just as much as they needed water to survive.

But what could he do? The village didn’t have much in terms of music aside from bar songs and sea shanties, and Kakashi wasn’t really a music-person. He could carry a few tunes, but all he knew were hunting songs and the forest songs he learned as a child. Living in the ocean, their music was surely different from the songs on land, but someone had to know at least one song.

The sound of low chatter made him look up, the sight of warm-lit lanterns and straw roofs greeting him. He’d managed to wander into the village square apparently, and he leapt back to avoid being run over by a chicken cart. Though the market was usually closed by this hour, there must have been really good business today since no one seemed ready to stop selling their wares.

_‘Maybe someone here knows something.’_

He began at the bars where all the sailors gathered. While many of the villagers caught the fish here, the main market for fish was in the capital further inland. Though the fish would never be able to survive the journey inland unless salted, there was a port city just an hour up the road. Though Konoha fishing village had prime waters to fish in, the cove water wasn’t deep enough to dock a large boat, so the fishermen would send their catches up the coast to be sold around the country.

When it was apparent that no one knew anything, he moved further into the heart of the town, asking the village stores and locals that he’d overlooked. Naturally, they wanted to know why he was suddenly interested in mermaid lore. Coming up with an excuse of how his sister wanted mermaid stories for her children, the villagers were unable to help, but offered to spread the word and wished him luck, leaving only the traveling merchants who were thankfully still here.

By sundown, everyone in the village knew about Kakashi’s quest, so the merchants did their best to oblige. He went down stall by stall, organizing his path by their wares. All the fish merchants hadn’t a clue, just like the herbalists and farmers, leaving only the trinket vendors.

“Excuse me. Would you happen to know any mermaid songs? My sister wants some to add to my niece’s story collection and I’d be grateful for the help,” he asked the crystal vendor. By now, all the children that had been wandering the streets were tucked in bed and those who remained in the village were either residents or people staying at the inn.

The crystal vendor shook his head sadly; he had no stories. Sighing, Kakashi thanked him for his time and was off to the next vendor when a voice spoke.

“I know mermaid songs.”

Kakashi had been so arrested by the voice that his heel ground audibly to a halt in the dirt. Turning to look at the owner of the voice behind him—to the first person who had what he needed—he found a young woman looking at him with a mysterious smile. Her lips gleamed ruby red in the lantern light. Her dark hair, held up by a comb made of whale ivory, blew gently in the evening breeze. Dimly, he realized the top of her head barely reached his shoulder.

“I can teach you them…for a price.” As she said this, she licked her lips, eyeing him appreciatively. Instantly, his grateful gaze turned wary. He’d met women like her in the past.

“I can’t give you what you want,” he told her, his gaze firm. The woman threw her head back and laughed deeply. Mockingly.

“You think I want _that_? My good sir, I only need you to help me with some chores. Besides, look at our difference in size. If anything, I should be afraid of you,” she said with a toothy grin, but her eyes flashed in the night, a predatory air surrounding her.

Kakashi weighed his options. He didn’t trust this woman at all, but she was the only one who seemed to know mermaid songs. If he could teach even one to Sakura, she could reclaim part of herself again. She might even smile again when she looked at the sea.

“What’s your price?”

“I’ll teach a line a week—of any song you want. In exchange, come to my hut on the northern-most part of the shore every Thursday. I’ll give you your tasks then,” she explained before extending her hand, a brow raised challengingly. “Do we have a deal?”

Her voice was as smooth and alluring as satin. Behind the salt and sea water, the scent of crushed violets clung to her skin. Her smile was dark, challenging, bearing too much confidence for a woman of her age and height, and for the briefest second, Kakashi thought he saw a shadowy figure glide across the lantern light behind her. Everything was screaming at him to walk away—to look somewhere else—that surely another person would hold the answers he was looking for—but it was so tempting…

And then a picture of Sakura smiling sadly out onto the water crossed his mind. His hand held the stranger’s firmly.

“You have your deal,” Kakashi said firmly. “What’s your name?”

To this, the woman laughed. “Silly Kakashi. Does it matter? You only want one thing from me.”

And with that, the woman slipped her hand from his grasp, pulled the hood of her cloak over her head and walked away, leaving Kakashi alone in the night. Around him, the market had begun closing its stalls and packing up for the night.

Kakashi stared at the hand he’d used to seal the deal. Vaguely, somehow he felt as if he’d sold his soul to the woman. And in some ways, perhaps he had since he now had to lie to Sakura about his whereabouts every Thursday.

 _‘It’s for the best.’_ After all, if he had sold his soul, he’d done it for Sakura. It seemed like everything he did now was for her. If she had one day asked for him to kill someone for her, he probably would. And if this one little lie would bring back her smile on the one day of a year that she regained her form, then he could live without his soul.

And with that, he began to walk back to his small cottage, unaware of the eyes watching him from the woods, a dark predatory smile gleaming from the forest.

* * *

“You know, if you keep wearing that mask, you’re going to get weird tan lines.”

At Sakura’s warning, Kakashi merely smiled. “That’s why I wear this straw hat,” he said, pointedly tipping the accessory at her. Sakura merely huffed, her nostrils flaring slightly as she let her body bob straight up-and-down in the water, something she always did when she was annoyed or irritated. Kakashi merely shook his head and tossed a stone onto the water, watching as it skipped over the gently lapping waves.

“Do you have to go?” she asked at last, her mood over as she stared at him with large, pleading eyes. Kakashi smiled gently down at her from behind his mask.

“Yes. Remember how I told you I got a job doing handiwork for someone in the village? I need to go there once a week, but I’ll be back tomorrow. I promise,” he said giving the same explanation he gave every week since starting the job eight weeks ago. Sakura nodded her head. He’d explained it in full the first time; how there was a woman who needed help fixing her roof and he was the only one who could help, and because of how she paid, he could afford to get Sakura something especially nice the next time he went into town. She was confused why he needed more money—she could just talk a few tuna into his net if he really needed it—but Kakashi explained it wasn’t the money he was after, and the matter was dropped. Even if she was still devastated every time he left her, even Sakura understood Kakashi wouldn’t budge on this issue. He was stubborn like that.

“You won’t work on the Harvest Moon day, right?” Sakura asked. Kakashi noticed a hint of anxiety in her voice as she asked, and saw that she was genuinely concerned at the prospect of him not being here on her special day since it’d fallen on a Thursday this year.

“I’ll ask for the day off if I still have to work, but I don’t think it should take that long. I’ll probably be done with the job by then.”

When she continued to look at him with worry, Kakashi lowered his head, letting his lips brush over the top of her head. “I’ll be here for the Harvest Moon. I promise,” he reassured before leaving for his client’s house. Only when she was sure that he would not turn back and see her did Sakura raise a flipper in an attempt to touch where he’d kissed her, a small blush under her grey fur.

* * *

The woman was already waiting for him by the time Kakashi reached the top of the small cliff his client lived on. It was a quaint stone cottage situated in front of a sheer cliff side.  A small vegetable garden stood guard on the right side of the cottage as a white fence marked the perimeter, leaving a small opening where an unkempt path led to the natural platform carved out of sandstone by the waves. A gust of wind blew, sending the collection of glass bottles strung together on her fence clacking and clinking together.

“So what’s the job this week?” he asked blandly, his hands in his pockets. Like every week, he was ready to get the job over with as soon as he started. The first one was to repair her leaking roof. Another job required him to fix her fence, while another was to weed her vegetable garden. Though he was still suspicious of her motives, it appeared that the woman really did need help with handiwork for her cottage.

“Aw, you’re no fun, Kakashi. Why not relax a little?” the woman said, tracing the hem of her shirt in a tantalizing manner.

“No. I’m quite well-rested and I have a few matters to take care of back in the village once this is over, so I’d rather just get my task for the week.”

An irritated growl escaped his client—not that he’d been fazed by it. It was a fairly regular occurrence now since he had continued to rebuff her advances—and she narrowed her gaze. “Fine,” she barked, “Build me a new cabinet for my things! Five shelves! Your supplies are over there!” And with that, she stormed into the cottage. Kakashi, nonplussed by the tantrum, shrugged and picked up the hammer.

_‘At least I can work in peace now.’_

* * *

Anko gnawed on her finger nervously behind the draped windows of her cottage. Damn it, this wasn’t going according to her plan at all.

It was simple, really. After Sakura was turned into a seal, Anko had expected her to waste away, maybe lay herself in front of a boat to kill herself at the prospect of never going home to her family again—feel an ounce of the despair Anko felt when Dan killed her master. Human interventions had been expected—those foolish mortals were always meddling in things that didn’t concern them—but for Sakura to recover, to find _hope_ in a **_human_** insulted her entire scheme for vengeance.

However, she consoled herself. The girl was still stuck as a seal and could never make it out of the cove alive. She would never meet her family again, and happiness would continue to elude her like shadows on the wall. Even as she gained a friend in her hired help, they could never be together.

But they wanted to. It was plain to see. The longing gazes, the endless streams of favor, the loving gestures that sickened her to her stomach. There was nothing so disgusting to Anko like a couple in love. Sickness and misery, that was what the world needed because the ideals of happiness and love, of joy and adoration, of fidelity were a fool’s pipe dream. Dreams, happiness—those things were child’s play. Children dreamed. This was reality, and _no one_ dreamed in reality.

So she schemed of how to tear them apart, break their happiness over her knee and rip it apart bit by bit in her hands. She thought of cursing Kakashi, torturing him, _killing him_ , but really, why waste such a lovely face?  

But fortune is kind on occasion. Though she normally avoided the village like the plague—stupidity was contagious down there, and being with those insipid mortals and having contact with them was something of horror to her—Anko had run out of a few key items needed for potion-making and was forced to venture into the bowels of her personal hell when what did she hear, but Kakashi’s hopeless quest ringing in her ear?

It was perfect, really. She’d been looking for a way to crush the young girl’s spirit, and what was more painful to bear—more horrid than death—than watching the person you trusted—the person you loved…with another? She’d be able to have her way with a handsome man and break Sakura all in one go. Even better, once her fun was done, she could kill Kakashi as well. Just to put the final nail in her coffin.

So she struck a deal with Kakashi. He’d come over to her house and she’d seduce him into loving her. After all, seducing men was something Anko could do in her sleep. No man could resist her charms—but that damned man! He let her offers bounce off of him harmlessly, apparently unfazed by even her best tricks. Not even her potions worked (though she suspected he never actually drank anything she offered him), and what was worse, she was running out of chores for him to do.

Perhaps it was partly her fault. After all, she could’ve fed him pig slop as a mermaid song, but she hadn’t been paying attention the first day and had accidentally shown him the book where the mermaid songs were kept. Now, whenever he finished, she had to feed him line after line of the song he’d bookmarked. The man even made her swear an oath of the highest order for the page to be untouched by her; and at the risk of being smote by lightening by Neptune whenever she stepped out of her house, she had to keep her word. Bollocks.

It was foolish of her, she knew—she’d essentially shot her foot, then stuffed it in her mouth to choke herself—but something in her told her that this man was not to be trifled with—that he was not all that he appeared to be…which was part of the fun, really.

Even so, there was a small consolation. She had some inkling to his true purpose for learning a mermaid’s song— _probably for that stupid girl_ —but the song he was looking for would not be finished by the harvest moon for her to sing. He’d be in the palm of her hand for at least a few more months before that song ended.

Idly, her finger traced a small painting in the locket she kept around her neck of her late master, Orochimaru. Oh, how she missed her master. After all, he was the man who took her in and taught her magic. He’d shown her everything in life. He showed her the folly of man, showed her the carnal pleasures in life, how to kill—how to _hate._

An image of Dan’s face flashed behind her eyes. Her lips curled into a snarl, but before she could act on her sudden bout of rage, a knock came at the door.

Smoothing any hair that had flown out of her comb, Anko calmed herself and cleared her throat. “Come in.”

“I’ve finished the task. Where shall I put it?” Kakashi asked, bringing in the crude shelving unit. It wasn’t much to look at, but it did the job and would certainly hold anything the woman put in it.

“Oh, help me transfer the items from over there to the new shelf. I’ll give you an extra line if you do. And don’t worry about the old shelf. I’ll just turn it into firewood,” she told him, waving her hand towards the corner where a collection of small vials stood.

Wordlessly, Kakashi set forth on his task, the sound of clinking bottles and the dull “thunk” of the vials hitting the wood ringing out in the small cottage. “Once I’m done, I will take my fee and leave. Also, I will be taking the day of the harvest moon off.”

At the mention of the harvest moon, Anko suddenly tensed. If she wanted to torture the girl, the two couldn’t meet that day.

“Are you going to go to the festival?” she asked. “I’m sure I can offer far more _interesting activities…_ ”

As she spoke, she pressed her body to him, her breasts flush into his back as she ran her hand up his leg. When he didn’t react, only staring straight ahead with the even-paced clicks of vials being shelved ringing between them, she tried her luck further, pressing kisses into his skin as she opened her bodice, pushing her full flesh against him as she ran her hand up his inner thigh when suddenly…he stopped, catching her hand in his. The smile had just settled on her lips when he suddenly turned about, all thoughts of conquest evaporating as she realized that his eyes smoldered with not lust, but rather anger.

“Though I am flattered by the attention, I came here for only one reason. And while I feel that I have humored you enough now, know that my patience for your trifles wears thin.” His voice was a bare whisper, his lone eye a mere slit as he slipped his hold from her, leaving white fingerprints in his wake. Crossing over to the desk across the cottage, Kakashi hurriedly copied the next two lines from the book on top of the stack on the desk. Muttering that he was terminating his services to her as of today, he left, slamming the door shut and making the entire cottage shudder.

And only when the quake subsided and she was sure he was gone did Anko slide onto the floor and dare to breathe. 

* * *

Kakashi watched as the dawn crawled across the room, sending the shadows from the ivy clinging to his window skittering across his ceiling. He hadn’t been able to sleep the entire night, instead lying awake trying to figure out what to do. Today was the day of the Harvest Moon, the day that Sakura was supposed to turn back into a mermaid and he was supposed to give her the song he’d found. But temper and pride had intervened and he was now left with only ten lines—barely enough for use of anything.

“Damn it…”

The curse, softly hissed, floated to the rafters like spirits escaping the light, hanging there in the thin silence that cloaked his home. Regret and disappointment were consuming him. If he’d held his tongue—cooled his head, he might have gotten the end of the song by now (because surely the song could not be that long)—but now he had nothing but a pittance to offer.

But what was he supposed to do? His client was playing him for a cheap whore. Even if he was desperate, he wouldn’t sell his pride to her.

But hindsight is a funny thing, and in the silence of his cottage, he contemplated how far he would’ve gotten had he taken the unspoken deal. If he had slept with her for an additional line, he may well have been finished by now with days to spare. It would’ve been easy. Just another description of the job, but deep inside, he knew he could never take it. Even if he’d already sold his services to that woman, he could never do anything to betray Sakura. He’d rather skin himself alive.

Suddenly, a knock came at the window. Throwing his legs over the side of his bed, he crossed the small bedroom to the window, cracking it open. His eye widened in surprise.

“What are you doing here?”

“I have an emergency. My chimney collapsed and I know you quit, but I need help and you’re the only one I trust. I’ll pay you anything. I’ll even give you the rest of the song, no questions asked,” pleaded the dark-haired woman. Her eyes were glossy with tears, her cloak was hugged tightly around her in a bid to protect herself from the early morning cold, and on her left cheek, a large soot stain marred her pale skin.

Kakashi debated the matter in his head, rubbing his neck in agitation. On the one hand, this could be another ploy to try and seduce him, but perhaps she really did need the help. No one in their right mind would come out this early to a man’s house and endanger their reputation if they weren’t in dire need, and she would need to be able to set a fire as the fall months entrenched themselves deeper into the land. He had to help. Kakashi may have had a reputation in the village for being a lazy cheapskate who was habitually late (except when it involved the seal) and hated socializing when unneeded, but he was still a chivalrous man and couldn’t let a woman suffer if he could help.

But a part of him was dragging its heels, kicking and screaming in the dirt. It didn’t want to go. His gut was telling him to stay—to damn reputation because he could always build another one. He had experience, after all—because he couldn’t trust that woman. All the lies to just get him into her home, into her bed. It would be foolish—madness—to go back when every fiber in his being fought for self-preservation and to just _stay away from this woman. This tart. This harlot._

But the song… _to finish the song…_ Unbidden, his gaze flicked to the sheet of paper on his bedside table.

_‘Sakura…’_

“I’ll do it,” he answered at last, the feeling of a noose tightening around his throat inescapable.

“Great. Meet me an hour past noon at my house on the hill. The key is under the rock near the windowsill.”

And with that, he closed his window and stood by his bed, staring into the mattress, feeling as though death knells rang all around him.

* * *

Kakashi arrived fifteen minutes late to the woman’s house. Though usually when he was late for an appointment, he purposely dawdled in changing his clothing, enjoying a little reading, or stalling to chat more with Sakura, this time was different as he debated one last time whether or not he wanted to go, the two sides warring within him. But stubbornness was one of the few flaws he was apt to admit and he couldn’t bear giving Sakura anything but a finished song.

He was doing this for her, and it was that thought process that made him fit the key from the rock into the door and enter the house.

The cabin was dark, the light taking on the starched tightness of mid-afternoon as the sun set lower in the sky from the season. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to observe.

He picked up the floor plan from memory. Her cottage had an open lay out, the only door being the one he just entered from. Her bed lay in the far left corner from the door, raised slightly by a few stairs and a platform. Next to that was a bookshelf before hitting a corner, turning into a pantry and a table with a washbasin under the front window. In the window, dried vegetables and flayed lizards hung from a gnarled bit of rope that skipped over the top of the doorway. To the right of that seemed to be a pile of miscellaneous items flanking a desk littered with books and papers facing out to the ocean. Beside that was a large, sturdy wooden table she used for cooking preparation, the corner of it catching the light; and behind that was the chimney, supposed to be in a state of disrepair...

By the time Kakashi realized that the chimney was fine, the door had closed firmly behind him.

“You lied,” Kakashi said lowly, more resenting than accusing. Smiling, the dark-haired woman circled him slowly, leisurely dragging a finger over his body as she moved.

“Maybe,” she replied airily. “But my offer still stands. If you let me bed you today, I’ll give you the rest of the song,” she said letting her eyes trail pointedly to the blue book on the desk by the window.

He followed her gaze, eye transfixed by the blue book gleaming in the slowly waning light. If he slept with her, he could complete his gift to Sakura and return music to her life. Even if it sacrificed his morals, it wasn’t the first time he wore the mask of a whore. He’d done it before, and he could do it again, laying there unmoving until the other person got what they wanted. Pleasure meant nothing in those situations when he’d only done it for one goal, and this was no different.

In the back of his mind, Sakura’s sad, mournful notes hung like glass in the corridors of his mind.

His client trailed her arms up his torso, opening the crossing laces at the collar of his shirt to reveal his skin. When he didn’t stop her, she smiled to herself wickedly, spreading her fingers over the expanse of his collarbone and planting a kiss there.

Kakashi, on the other hand, was trying not to let his skin crawl. Disgust pressed at his senses, picking at the backs of his eyes like crows on a corpse when she pushed his sleeves up, opened his shirt more, and lavished his exposed skin in kisses that left him feeling a little more drained than the last. He tried the old tricks, staring out at the ocean horizon when the back of her hand skated the underside of his jaw, biting the inside of his cheek when she undid the fabric knot of his scarf, the mask falling gently to the ground between them. Like all the others who’d come before her, she gasped in surprise at the handsomeness of his face; an action that neither pleased him nor stroked his ego as he tried to erase the memory of her kiss on his masked lips and braced himself for their bare-skinned point of contact. As she trailed kisses up his neck, he wondered in the back of his mind if she found any pleasure in this—in attempting to romance what ultimately equated to a log or stone wall. She seemed a bit frustrated, and it was something they both seemed to realize as she put more effort into the kiss, attempting to draw any reaction from him. As she got closer to his mouth, he briefly wondered what her style of kissing was. If memory served correctly, he’d experienced at least seven different kinds during his term of active duty.

He soon found out when she planted her lips on his, biting and sucking on his closed mouth, more an act of war than tenderness. Desperation tinged the kiss, causing pity to well up in his stomach; she was so desperate that he was beginning to feel sorry for her.

However, she suddenly changed tactics and he wondered if she sensed his impending snort of ridicule when her kiss abruptly softened, turning chaste as she began to play coy with her mouth. Unbidden, the old hunting instinct of the forest awoke, poised to chase—to run—to conquer as she began to lead her head away teasingly. In the back of his mind, he wondered if kissing Sakura would be as innocent and provoking as this.

At the mention of Sakura, Kakashi’s blood suddenly ran cold, regret darkening his system as guilt clutched his tenuous veins in its iron grip, he a mere puppet in its hands as the thoughts began to race. Of her tears, of her hurt face, her broken heart. He may have been doing this for her, but at what price? There was his own pride, but he neglected to remember that he had also sold Sakura’s trust. He was deceiving her, lying to her face and smiling about it. Even if he returned music to her life, would she be happy knowing how he’d acquired it?

How would she react, he wondered. Sad? Hurt? Angry? Would she ever talk to him again? Would she even forgive him?

His heart throbbed in agony at the thought. “I can’t do it,” he muttered softly.

“What?” the woman asked softly against his lips. Unmoving, he repeated himself. “You can keep the song. I can’t do it,” he told her.

Kakashi had been expecting a bad reaction. In the past, when his clients realized the truth, there were usually a few tears, insults, a thrown perfume jar or two; so he wasn’t very surprised when she scratched his chest and pushed him back.

“Why _not?!_ ” she seethed, nostrils flaring as she threw her hands at her side in an act of anger and exasperation.

Kakashi just looked away.

At his silence, a shocked, disbelieving laugh escaped her. The stab to her pride was evident. The blood from his chest was still dripping onto the floor as she spoke.

“What? Didn’t want to betray your girlfriend or something? Aren’t you cute?” she said scornfully before she sneered at him spitefully. “Well, doesn’t matter. Even if you did give her the song, it wouldn’t change a thing. She’ll still be a seal,” she laughed.

Kakashi’s eye widened in shock; he grabbed her. “I never mentioned Sakura. How did you…?”

At this, a smile grew on the dark-haired woman’s lips. “Who do you think put that curse on her?”

Kakashi’s eye grew in surprise as horror gripped his throat, clawing up over his tongue and lips, threatening to choke him as she threw her head back and laughed; a mocking, malicious sound that bounced off the walls back at him unendingly, even as he threw her away from him. Disgust and guilt grew inside him like a parasite; he felt trapped. Panicking, he made for the closed door, turning the knob and ramming it with his shoulder until it burst open at his force. Pain shot up his neck and his arm dangled uselessly at his side—he’d dislocated his shoulder, but the instinct to run away from this place—from _her_ outweighed any pain, any agony he felt.

And so he launched himself through the door, trying to escape like an injured animal from the belly of the beast. His heartbeat in his head, he began to run down the hill, much darker than he remembered it being— _how long had he been in there?_ —as Anko’s laugh chased him through the shadows of the trees and his mind. As he ran, he wiped furiously at his mouth, desperate to rid all traces of the vile woman off of him. In the back of his mind, the thought repeated endlessly.

_He’d betrayed her. He’d betrayed her._

But even as it looped in his mind, as the acid taste sat on his tongue and ate away at him from the inside, Kakashi refused to think about it—that he had betrayed her in the finest sense—instead running further down the path from whence he came as the Harvest Moon and Anko’s laugh licked at his heels.

* * *

 

By the time that Kakashi looked up to catch his breath and pop his shoulder back in, he found himself back at the beach by the village. It was late—almost midnight since even the light at the bar had been snuffed out for the night. In fact, every light in the village was out, leaving only the moon and stars to guide him.

Slowly, he walked along the shore, hissing slightly when his feet—raw from running—met sand. He’d lost one of his shoes as he was running while the other was torn beyond repair, leaving both feet bruised and bleeding from his journey through the forest. The waves lapped gently at his feet, stinging his wounds, but the cool touch of the water outweighed the pain and he continued to make his way along the water.

He found her on a rock bordering the tide pool. Her back was to him, her hair like a pale rose in the moonlight as her tail shimmered in rich hues of pale blues and greens, idly slapping and turning over on the rocks. He didn’t even need to hear her speak to know she was disappointed.

“You’re late. The harvest moon is almost over,” she began in a quavering voice that made him feel even more like a bastard than before. Whipping her head, she turned to face him, the gleam of unshed tears held in her eyes. “You promised me that you would be here!”

The sentence, hurt and accusing, was more painful than a whip on bare flesh, and more accurate than an arrow. In the spaces between, he could hear the things she hadn’t told him: how much she looked forward to this day; how long she’d waited; how she wished that she had just given up on waiting for him; how pathetic she felt for doing so.

“You promised me. You _never_ go back on your word,” she spat through watery eyes and a quivering lip. “What the _hell_ were you doing that was so much more important than your promise?”

Silence stretched between them, Sakura’s anger scorching the air between them as Kakashi reached into his pants’ pocket.

“I was trying…to get you this,” he said lamely. Handing her the slip of paper, it dawned on Kakashi how pathetic and stupid this was, and had it been the time, he would’ve laughed aloud.

Sakura stared at him suspiciously before snatching the paper from his fingers, opening the neatly folded parchment and holding it to the moonlight to read.

“It’s a mermaid song…well, part of it—I couldn’t get the ending,” Kakashi explained. In the back of his mind, he knew he’d left out key pieces of information, but he didn’t dare tell her—didn’t dare throw those barbed arrows to strike her heart in her already-fragile state. But that was a lie. Kakashi had already resolved to never tell her what transpired in that horrid cottage on the hill if he could help it.

Sakura continued to stare at the paper in her hands. “Why…”

“Because you’ve been humming. Even if you don’t want to admit it, you miss music, Sakura, and I just…I wanted to give it back to you, even if it is only one song,” Kakashi sighed, rubbing his neck in agitation as regret coated his tongue. “I know it isn’t much—”

“I love it.”

The declaration, so sudden and short, made Kakashi look up, watching as Sakura’s small frame trembled with joy at the small piece of parchment in her hands.

“It’s the song my mother used to sing me to put me to sleep,” she said with tears in her eyes, touching her fingers to her lips as her eyes traced the letters over and over again, the memories traced and gathered like shells on the beach. A smile played on her lips as her fingers followed her eyes, her joy gaining momentum as she read the paper over and over again.

Then, suddenly, her eyes shut and her fingers returning to the top of the page, she began to sing. Her voice was bright and slightly unsteady, growing stronger as she gained confidence in herself, turning the words that had seemed awkward and thick on his tongue the one time he tried to read the text into a powerful melody.

She sang about the sea, of the rolling waves, of the colorful coral and the kindness of the Mother Ocean. Going beyond the limits of the text, she sang of the colorful clouds of jellyfish, of the playful dolphins, of the serenity of the water, of the moon, the stars…

When she finally finished, chest heaving and eyes bright from excitement, he saw it. Her spark was back. She’d reclaimed a part of her soul back. He smiled.

Paper still in hand, she threw her arms around Kakashi and hugged him. “Thank you,” she whispered softly against his skin. Even if the ink faded away and the paper melted in the water, even if she could never return home, the fact she had this song to console her made her curse a little more bearable.

Kakashi merely returned the embrace, patting her reassuringly. “It’s fine,” he replied softly.

Smiling, the two held each other for a little while longer when Sakura pulled away from him slightly. “Since you gave me music back—gave me my mother back—let me give something to you.”

Under his breath, Kakashi chuckled. “Sakura, if this is another marlin, I don’t think…”

“Not that!” she said petulantly, slapping his arm lightly for good measure. “It’s something better than that. I’m going to fix your eye.”

At her words, Kakashi reached up to touch his left eye tenderly, his fingers tracing over the long, thin scar bisecting his eyelid and trailing down his cheek.

Kakashi’s eye was one of those things that lay between them, acknowledged, but never spoken of. When she had been younger, back when they first met, she had once asked about his eye. Unlike the lower half of his face, he never bothered to cover the scar on his eye and told her that before he moved to the ocean, he’d lived in the forest and gotten into a fight. As a result, he’d received an injury to his eye that left him not only a scar, but blind as well. Sakura, naïve as she was back then, just took it as another facet of humans she didn’t know before and accepted it in passing before the matter was dropped and they never spoke of it again. That being said, for her to bring it up again…

“Sakura, wait. I don’t think this is such a good—”

A pleading look from her silenced him. “Please, Kakashi. You gave me something so wonderful…I have to pay you back. Just… _please._ _Let me do this._ ”

His hands were caught in hers, gripped in a tight, beseeching tension that traveled from her eyes to her hands. Words of protest froze on his tongue. He was uncomfortable with the idea—didn’t want her to feel as if she was indebted to him for this—but even so, he found himself unable to resist her as she seated him on his usual fishing rock on shore—a short, smooth rock the size and height of a large footrest—her tail trailing behind her as she knelt in front of him. Pushing herself up to stand over him, she tilted his head up to face her and brushed his hair back from his eyes.

“Just focus on me,” she said as the waves crashed and lapped peaceably behind her.

“I will,” he replied, not quite sure why, but feeling compelled to. Sakura merely smiled in her girlish, mildly-chiding way before cupping his face.

“Don’t blink,” she told him, feeling him nod slightly in her hands before smiling. As he stared up at her, he drank her in. Her skin, a milky porcelain around him, held him captive as the smell of warm days, fresh sea salt, and the strange floral scent that always managed to cling to her wreathed his senses.

Her hair blew softly in the sudden light sea breeze, the pink strands wafting gently on the air currents as she stood over him, her head slightly bowed. Her eyes shut, he watched her serene face as her long lashes fluttered over her rosy cheeks and wondered what she was trying to do when he saw it. On the edge of her lashes, a large crystalline tear hung over him before he felt his head being tilted slightly higher and the tear splash into his snow-white eye.

As he blinked the tear away, Kakashi felt Sakura pull her arms away. He felt slightly dizzy and he groped into the darkness, feeling her hands catch his arm.

“I’m right here,” she reassured, feeling him relax in her arms. Nodding, he waited until the dizziness subsided before blinking his eyes open, his vision crossing for a second before he shielded his left eye from the bright light of the moon.

Wait…he shielded his left eye from the light.

Walking over to the water, he peered into his reflection. The scar was still there and while his left eye was no longer white, it wasn’t the one he remembered having as a child—now red with three black commas instead of the pure charcoal grey of his right eye—but did that really matter right now? He was staring at his reflection with both eyes now. Kakashi…could see.

Turning to face Sakura, all he wanted to say lay between them, uttered without a sound. That the legends were true—that mermaid tears could heal anything; that he was grateful beyond words; that she didn’t have to.

Sakura merely smiled at him. “The odd coloring is a side effect of the tear. Your eye will be sensitive to light for a little while, but it’ll be fine once your brain gets used to using it again,” she told him with a modest smile, as if she hadn’t just healed his eye. The notion of “it’s fine” hovered in the air.

Still…

“Thank you. I mean it,” Kakashi admitted quietly, grabbing her hand and squeezing it. At the gesture—Kakashi was not one for initiating contact usually—Sakura flushed prettily and stared at the floor. “It’s nothing, really. It’s the least I could do for you after what you did.”

But even still, he did not let go. “You’re welcome,” she said at last, and smiling, Kakashi let his fingers slide from her grasp when the ocean waves suddenly got louder.

“Midnight is almost here. I should go back to the water before I transform,” she told him. Helping her back into the ocean, Kakashi watched as she waded into deeper waters, her skin slowly turning grey and her scales shedding from her tail to turn into fur. Only when the last of her pink hair disappeared beneath the waves and a seal head bobbed in its place did Kakashi leave the beach, returning to his cottage in the village for the night.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the second to last chapter. To be honest, I feel like I’m dying right now. My ideas are only stringing me along at this point and I’m being dragged in the dirt eating their dust. 
> 
> Drama llamas in this chapter. Just a warning.

“Kakashi…how do humans mate?”

At the question, Kakashi nearly fell off the rock he had been sitting on. Catching himself, he reseated himself and recast the fishing pole that had been knocked into the water by his leg.

“Sakura, why are you so curious about how we mate?” he asked, voice tense with anxiety.

His seal companion bobbed happily in the water, oblivious to his discomfort on the topic.

“When I was swimming out in the cove, I wandered near Genma’s boat and he was talking about how he bedded a blonde woman from two towns over. He went into some strange story afterwards about different positions and screaming and hair-pulling after that, but that doesn’t make sense, does it?”

 _‘No. If it’s Genma, it does,’_ Kakashi thought with a sigh—not that he should talk since he kept literary porn stashed behind the covers of a carefully cut-out book that he brought with him to the beach every day. (The poor, misguided villagers all thought he was reading the Bible or something to make up for not attending church on Sundays. Pity, really.)

“Human sex usually doesn’t involve that. Genma is what we call a ‘Special Case,’” Kakashi began, closing his book and putting it beside him before debating how to move on with this subject. In the back of his mind, he was glad he never had a daughter.

“You see, like most animals, humans have two sexes. Those sexes are determined by which of the two sets of sex organs they have. Females have what is called the ‘vagina,’ located between their legs, which is part of the organ that creates eggs. Males—like me—have a ‘penis’ which helps deliver sperm to the egg. Once the egg is fertilized, the egg develops into a baby, creating another human,” he said before throwing in a few other facts to cover his bases.

 _There, that should cover it,_ and he waited with baited breath for Sakura’s reaction, watching as her brows—or at least, where they should’ve been if she was in her mermaid form—knit with intensity. Inwardly, Kakashi hoped she wouldn’t ask for any demonstrations. (Examples, he didn’t worry about because she’d seen them before when the kids from the village played in the water during summer.)

“So wait, humans can procreate all year round, but they often don’t do it to further their race? They do it for…fun?” Sakura made a face. “Human beings are weird.”

“Well, humans don’t operate on the same rules of nature that govern other animals. And there are certain connotations placed with sex in our society, such as religious significance and the idea that it’s proof of a couple’s love for each other. And don’t knock it until you try it. It’s supposed to be very pleasurable. Besides, how do mermaids mate?”

Sakura blinked. “The female lays her eggs in a protected area and the male swims by and fertilizes it. After the eggs are fertilized, they take turns taking care of the clutch of eggs until they hatch. Once hatched, they start developing like humans,” she explained clinically before switching topics, looking at him with a curious eye.

“Hey Kakashi…have you ever had sex?”

Kakashi laughed nervously and leaned down to pat Sakura’s head. “Let’s not worry about me, eh Sakura?” 

* * *

Sakura bobbed happily in the water before letting her stomach float to the surface, sunning herself in the gentle-moving current as she mentally checked off another day towards the Harvest Moon. Though she always looked forward to the Harvest Moon, this year was going to be especially exciting. Why? Because she was going to go see Kakashi’s house this year.

The conversation started a few weeks ago when the topic of the Harvest Moon was just awakening in both their minds. The topic of village housing had been breached—mostly because Sakura had steered it that way—when Sakura asked to see his house the next Harvest Moon. After all, he saw her house everyday and it was only natural that she would be curious about human households after learning so much about the culture. Praying that Kakashi would not deny her request—she knew it would be a difficult request to facilitate—she was overjoyed when he told her he saw no reason it couldn’t be done and he would work on preparations as the harvest moon closed on them.

Now the event was merely a week away, she thought with an eager smile and an excited splash of her tail before throwing the small mackerel she had caught earlier into her mouth, munching away happily. In fact, she’d been so engrossed in her lunch that she hadn’t realized she had drifted into the shadow of one of the village’s fishing boats until she had to suddenly dive down to avoid being hit across the face with an oar.

“Did you see Kakashi’s eye?” one of the fishermen on the boat whispered.

“If you mean the white, he’s blind in that eye. He tries not to show it around though. Says he doesn’t want to scare the kids,” a voice she recognized as Genma’s replied.

“No, it’s not white. At least, not anymore,” the first voice told the boat. In her mind, Sakura realized they were talking about the eye she healed for Kakashi as thanks for giving music back to her. Since then, he told her that true to her word, the dizziness had subsided by the next day and that he saw just as well he did before losing his vision before patting her head affectionately. At the memory, she purred slightly, preening herself a little. If she had been in her female form, her cheeks would have been as red as Kakashi’s eye.

However, though Kakashi could now see perfectly well in that eye, he told her that he would continue to keep his left eye closed when there were people around. When she asked why, Kakashi told her that rumors would start and he didn’t want to draw the attention. Though she hadn’t understood what he meant before, she understood now.

“What do you mean?” Asuma, another man on the boat, asked.

“It’s red now—like blood—with three black marks in it. I saw it with my own two eyes. Tarou saw it too,” the man explained. “You know what that kind of coloring means right? It’s magic. _Mermaid_ magic.”

Suddenly, whispers rounded the boat. Some wondered how Kakashi could have met a mermaid while others wagered that he bought it off someone or that he asked a sea witch for help with his eye. Other whispers were more tame, merely commenting on mermaid magic and the confirmation of their healing powers being true, only to be interrupted by Genma’s ferocious roar.

“Argh! Lucky bastard! First he just has to sit on his ass on the shore and he gets half a net’s worth of fish, and now he got to see a mermaid! Some guys get all the luck!” Genma bemoaned to the murmured agreements of some of the men on the boat while Asuma pointed out that he could’ve bought the tears from a merchant.

“How’d he hurt his eye anyway?” one of the men asked, the others nodding because it was hard to miss such a long, thin scar in such an obvious place.

“Maybe he got into it with a marlin. My cousin lost his eye the same way,” one of the men on the boat quipped.

“No. He’s originally from the forest and he had that scar before he came here,” said Asuma.

“Then maybe he got it from a boar. Those things are vicious. My sister’s husband lost three fingers to one of those beasts,” another man said.

“I heard he lost it in a bar brawl against twenty men!”

“I heard it was fifty!”

“I heard something else,” another man whispered lowly. “My sister, who lives in the forest, told me this, but when you think about it, it makes sense why he never shows the bottom half of his face.”

And with that, the fisherman began to recount the story told to him by his sister to all the fishermen on the boat, the passengers unaware of the seal listening in on the conversation in the shadow of the boat. 

* * *

The end of a setting sun at Kakashi’s back, the lone fisherman whistled the tune of a popular children’s song as he carried a bucket of sea water back from the beach, ignoring the curious stares of passersby as he did so—not that he minded much anymore. He’d had all afternoon to practice when he started gathering sea water earlier that day.

The bucket swinging gently in his hands, Kakashi turned the key to his house door, pushing in firmly before closing the door shut with his foot. Walking over to the large metal bathing basin he bought the previous day from the capital market, he poured the bucket’s contents in and inspected the water level, a few inches below the edge of the tub. Passing a hand through the clear grey water to check that the water was still cool, he shook the water off his hand before wiping it on his pants.

“Should be alright,” Kakashi told himself as he looked for anything else that needed to be addressed before he went to pick up Sakura tonight.

It was here after long last, the night of the Harvest Moon. Though he couldn’t say he was as excited as Sakura—even in seal form, she was vibrating with  joy as she counted down the days—he had been looking forward to tonight as well. After all, it was Sakura’s first time visiting his home and he tried to make everything perfect for tonight. He even cleaned his house, though it had been a thoroughly awkward affair since he did not have much to clean. Still, he tried.

He scanned his living room briefly. Here was where Sakura would stay for the duration of her visit. Though she wanted to see more of his home—and he had wanted to show her more—the tub he purchased wouldn’t fit through the doorframe leading to the back of his home and Sakura needed sea water to stay hydrated. As a seal, matters might be different and it would’ve been easier in letting her see his bedroom, but Kakashi couldn’t figure out how to excuse a seal visiting his home while Sakura wrinkled her nose and frowned at having to enjoy Kakashi’s house through the limited views of a seal, citing she wouldn’t be able to see things high up and it just wouldn’t be the same (which he agreed to).

Sighing, Kakashi raked a hand through his hair and nudged his footstool over his bearskin carpet.

Books surrounded him on all sides. While it had been a simple fisherman’s cottage when he first moved in, Kakashi had renovated it early on to fit his needs more. The endless racks for drying fish and hanging nets had been reduced to a small area near the window on the right side of the house by the door where he hung his one fishing net and rested his sole fishing pole, while the first layer of stone in the walls was taken out to construct built-in bookshelves to house the collection he carried with him in the move. The bookshelf, built with three large shelves under two smaller ones, surrounded half of the house, starting at the right of the left window to turn the corner and continue around another window before stopping at the next corner in the house. The wall across from the front entrance remained untouched by his renovations due to the cottage’s already-large stone fireplace, only needing a good cleaning before he placed a few sparse knick-knacks on the mantle and hung an old decoration above it. Kakashi’s small kitchen—consisting of a few pots and pans, really—sat to the left of the fireplace near the bookshelf under a set of hooks where he kept fireplace instruments and left a few herbs to dry. To the right of the fireplace was a stack of logs that sat against the wall under his collection of kitchen knives, small hunting knives and daggers, and his old hunting bow. The wall was interrupted by the entrance to his bedroom and study—one he had to remember to duck under constantly due to his height—before resuming for a brief moment to turn the corner. In that small area of space hung a worn engraving of two intertwined hands, a bundle of dried flowers and herbs standing petrified in the hands. Crossing over, Kakashi inspected the plants and made a mental note to replace them before passing a hand over his main table, sweeping his hand for crumbs before throwing down the scarf he wore over his face. Though it usually sat closer to the middle of the room—he did use it for cooking and dining, after all—he had to push it against the wall to make room for the tub due to its size (it could easily fit a man of standard height).

Running a hand over the lip of the metal basin, Kakashi briefly wondered what he would do with the basin after tonight. He’d been met with such envy in the town when he brought it back since bathing basins were seen as a luxury in these parts and almost everyone bathed in the rivers and streams in the area, including him, so it seemed a bit of an impractical purchase outside of tonight’s event. However, Sakura might want to repeat tonight’s event next year too, so he would have to keep it around. However, the only place he could keep the thing was either under his main table (and risk stubbing his toes constantly) or keep it outside. Briefly, Kakashi entertained using it as a trough for pig slop and wondered about how difficult it would be to keep pigs. Before he knew it, it was time to pick Sakura up from the beach.

Stepping out, Kakashi drank in the silence of the night before going down the cobblestone path that led into the village. Though he usually took the game path behind his house to avoid the villagers in the morning, it was already late enough that many of the villagers were home, or at least, weren’t going to go outside to bother him.

By the time Kakashi arrived at the beach, Sakura was already there, patiently waiting on a rock with her hands in her lap as she idly flapped her tail. If he didn’t know any better, he would’ve thought she was just a normal girl waiting for her boyfriend to appear for their date.

There were no words between them as he walked down to the lapping water and she wrapped her arms around his neck and helped him get a hold of her fish half, just as they discussed days prior. One arm supporting her shoulder with the other holding her where her knees would’ve been if she were human, he began to walk back the way he came. When his grip began to slip on her scales, Sakura shifted her hips and closed her arms around his neck tighter as he shifted her weight to get a better grip on her body. In the back of his head, Kakashi mused that whoever described mermaids as beings that were half-human and half-fish were right. Not only did their lower half have the form of a fish, but it was just as slippery, and he made sure to flash Sakura a grateful look when she tried to still the movements of her tail as best she could.

Eventually, they made it back to his home. Balancing her on his knee, Kakashi fit the key into the lock and pushed the door in with his foot before gently letting Sakura into the basin, her body sliding in with the graceful sound of a single water drop falling.

“There’s a bucket of water by the foot of the tub if there isn’t enough water,” Kakashi told her as he went back to close the door.

When he returned to her side, she waved the notion aside. “It’s fine. The water level is perfect,” she told him. True to her word, there was enough water to cover her body just under her shoulders if she submerged herself. Because the basin was slanted, her human-half reclined on the gentle metal slope while her hips and subsequent tail stayed in the deepest part of the water.

“Is your tail fin going to be okay?” Kakashi asked, pointing to the delicate, ornate fin hanging over the edge of the tub.

“It’ll be fine. This form won’t last that long anyway,” Sakura reassured before propping herself up in the tub, drinking in the sight of the room.

“You must read a lot,” Sakura commented idly as she turned in the tub, her eyes wandering the spines of the books in the walls. She always saw him with a book in his hands when he was at the beach, and recalling that Kakashi taught her most of her language skills, she wondered how many of these books he pulled down for her to practice with. At the memory, her hands began to faintly itch with the desire to hold the books and get one step further in being closer to the man who had given her so much.

Kakashi, who had been leaning against his reading chair near the fireplace, scratched his cheek sheepishly. “It’s a bit of an obsession collecting these,” he admitted. “But I’m no different from any of the other fishermen. Genma and Asuma probably read as much as I do.”

“No. Asuma only has a middle-school-level education, and Genma never touched a book after his father finished teaching him the basics needed for the fishing trade,” Sakura explained, having learned this after a conversation on the boat verged into talk of education levels. “To be honest, you probably read the most out of the entire village. You’re actually really highly-educated for a fisherman.”

“Is that right?” Kakashi laughed, a strange tinge of nervousness in his voice. “Well, you forget that I’m originally from the forest. Education standards are a bit different.”

“But that still doesn’t account for why you’re so highly-educated. You told me when we first met that you were the son of a woodsman, but you said it yourself that people of a lower economical status could not afford to educate their children. Even if your parents did well in the trade, it wouldn’t have been enough to afford a middle-school education.”

“My parents were just lucky,” Kakashi hastily explained, his eyes hardening slightly. Sakura, oblivious to Kakashi’s increasing nerves, plowed on without remorse.

“But don’t you see? That doesn’t make sense. Even a quality middle school education wouldn’t cover what you know. You know world politics, history, mathematics, science—economics. You know how to write and read well enough to have this vast of a library— _You taught me how to write and speak and read!_ In order for that to occur, you would’ve had to have received a quality education—one that isn’t available to regular citizens, meaning that your parents were rich enough to hire a tutor. Even excluding that, you said that you were a woodsman and moved to get healthier from the sea air, but you wouldn’t have been able to afford to have this many books on a woodsman’s salary—not even if your parents left you half of them. And they’re _old!_ So you can’t have bought them while you were in this town—”

“Sakura…”

“And you’re perfectly healthy. You’ve never been sick a day that I’ve known you and other than your eye and a few scars here and there, there’s nothing wrong with you. I never stopped to think about these things before, but once I heard the rumor and thought it over, everything made sense. Everything _makes_ sense. The level of conversation, these books, that bearskin rug…”

“Sakura, I don’t think—”

“I know how you really got the scar on your eye.” Her tone was firm and determined, almost accusing as her eyes dared him to say otherwise. “I heard it from one of the fishermen. You grew up the son of a knight, but worked as an assassin for hire. You killed anyone for a price, and your clientele were usually upper-class nobles who could afford you. It didn’t matter who the person was—once the order was placed, you did anything you could to do the job.”

“Sakura…”

“And you did it well—your belongings prove it. You were such an effective assassin, and you never left a trace. Your clients didn’t even know where you lived or how to contact you without going through a maze of people first, but they knew you were good. Too good. You were becoming a threat because you now knew too much, so they framed you for a murder you didn’t commit. Suddenly you were a wanted man and you ran—”

“Sakura…”

“But they followed you and attacked you, leaving you for dead when you were found by a couple in the forest who took you in. They healed you and took you in, but once your former client found out you were still alive, he sent men after you. They killed the couple, and you killed the men—including your former client who put the hit out on you—”

_“Sakura…”_

“Then you moved here to get away from it all. That’s what happened, isn’t it? That’s what really happened. You’re not really the son of a woodsman or anything like that. You’re really a wanted assassin on the run. That’s probably your father’s coat of arms over the fireplace. You aren’t denying anything, so it has to be true! What was it like being an assassin? Living in the forest? Running? Did you like killing people? Or were you doing it to survive? How did you get information on your targets? Did you follow then? How about the couple who found you? How old were they? Were they nice? What about—?”

“SAKURA!”

The girl suddenly stopped to look up at Kakashi from her basin across the room. To anyone else, he would’ve looked normal. One hand sat at his hip, one foot crossed over the other as he leaned against his tall armchair leisurely. His silver hair was tinged orange at the tips from the reflective light over his left eye and he seemed to be smiling at her. He seemed to be alright, but Sakura could see he wasn’t. Maybe it was because she’d spent so much time with him that she could read his tells, even if he didn’t think anyone else could because even at such a distance from him, she could see his tense grip on the back of his tall armchair, the firelight bathing his white-knuckle grip orange while his smile seemed to be a thin taut wire pulled ready to snap. Perhaps he was trying not to make her feel as bad as she currently felt—chastened, stupid, foolish, small—like a child being yelled at by someone much older and wiser and less insipid with words, life, and people—but there was no hiding the pain on his face. She had hurt him with her words, as cruel and deadly as any arrow he could have ever fired, and it showed in his slightly-wavering voice as he told her, “Maybe it’s time I took you home.” 

Immediately, Sakura’s eyes widened and words of protest were ready to leap off her tongue out of her mouth. She didn’t want to leave. She wanted to stay and explore more!

But a better, wiser side told her that she shouldn’t—that she had done too much damage today and _really, what would she prove by staying?_ He was right, she realized. The moment was gone, all because of her stupid mouth.

With a silent nod, she assented to the idea and lifted her arms out for him to carry her back to the beach. In the back of his head as he walked, Kakashi would later recall how lifeless she felt in his arms—almost like nothing, as if she willed her weight away to better shrink herself into oblivion.

* * *

Kakashi arrived home well after midnight. Though the path to the beach didn’t take long, he didn’t feel like hurrying home, instead taking his time after seeing Sakura back to the water. They had not spoken one word to each other on the journey there, only a small, slightly remorseful “thank you” that he gave a muttered reply to before she slipped away under the waves.

Closing the door behind him, he turned the key, resting against the door before giving a heavy sigh, trailing his gaze over the room wearily. His eyes caught sight of the basin still sitting undisturbed in the corner of the room, and following the small circles of salt crystals from where drops of sea water had dried when he had taken Sakura out of the bath, he scratched his head before letting it drop with a sigh. He’d take care of the sea water tomorrow—properly because he couldn’t afford to dump it in the backyard when he’d finally gotten his garden growing—and began walking towards the back of his house when he felt his foot nudge something. Looking down, it was the bucket of salt water he left Sakura, lying as still and untouched as before.

Kakashi leaned down to pick it up, feeling its weight in his hand. He’d found the bucket in the shed in his backyard when he first moved in. He hadn’t used it much since then, usually only to water his plants since he used a wooden bucket for his drinking water. Despite being a little beat up, the way it shined made it seem like the bucket was brand-new. Gripping it by the sides, he stared at his reflection in the water: at his orange-tinted silver hair, his pointed chin, his long thin scar, his blood-red eye.

Suddenly, Kakashi’s grip tightened.

It was wrong. Tonight was all wrong, he thought as his fingers locked tensely around the metal bucket, looking as if his hands would crumple it like paper. Tonight was a complete disaster.

He had imagined something different…that he would bring her home and just sit together as he showed her around his home, showed her more of human life, and pretended—he didn’t know why, but he wanted to pretend—that for a moment that this could an everyday occurrence and be happy for once. Instead, his past—the one he’d spent the past however many years running from—was suddenly spat in his face by the last person he wanted to have know about it.

Beside himself however, Kakashi was impressed how much she found out. Rumor or not, she’d come very close to the truth. In the back of his mind, he told himself that he shouldn’t be surprised. Sakura was as intelligent as him, and it was one of the reasons he loved her.

Sakura had started her string of accusations with the idea that he was the son of the knight. However, she was only partially right. His father, Hatake Sakumo, had indeed been a knight in the king’s service, but that was before his title had been stripped away for failing to ride into battle against a village in the East—something about not feeling comfortable killing women and children. But he supposed a former-knight was still a knight.

His parents never married. His mother had been a normal girl in the village near the capital kingdom where Sakumo retired after his title was stripped from him. After his dismissal from the king’s court, Sakumo had fallen into a deep depression and his mother—despite her beauty and her intelligence—was the only one willing to take care of the pitiful man. Eventually, they fell in love--or at least, they liked each other enough to live together—and he was conceived. Talks of marriage had been in place as his delivery date neared, but they never went ahead with it by the time he arrived. Even when his mother died a year later from illness, their marriage plans had never gone beyond talks.

Sakumo had been charged to take care of his young son now that his mother was gone, but her death merely sent him into depression again and he began to drink heavily. From what Kakashi personally remembered, Sakumo was only his parent four times in Kakashi’s young childhood, and that was only when he was sober enough to remember he had a son to take care of.

His father died when Kakashi was four; he remembered because he was the one who buried Sakumo somewhere in the forest that surrounded their house before going back inside to play with his dogs. For some reason, though Sakumo couldn’t even care for his son, he always found enough room in his heart to care for a stray dog.

Not that Kakashi minded. Those dogs were his friends when his father was drunk—which was nearly all the time—and became his family when Sakumo died, raising him as their own until his father’s friend, Minato, found Kakashi alone in the forest a few weeks later. After that, Minato adopted him and brought him home to raise.

Unlike his father, Minato was still in the kingdom’s court and raised him with all that the position entitled him to. Kakashi was given the best of everything—the best horses, the best tutors, the best food (though Kakashi frequently hunted wild hogs to bring home because he preferred the taste), the best trainers—and he returned nothing but the best scores and highest awards. The king had even personally praised his ability to fight, but despite Kakashi’s obvious intelligence and talent, the other knights refused to acknowledge him. To them, he was nothing but the bastard son of a failed knight, worth less than the dirt their horses trotted on.

It was then that Kakashi decided to put his skills to work as an assassin. It was obvious that in the tangled web of connections and family lineage of the court that he’d never become a knight, and since Minato had died in battle and could no longer help him, he had no friend left in the king’s court.

However, that also left no one to protest his actions as he began selling his skill for a price. Though some might have protested his decision (Minato, especially since it was he who instilled the knight-ideals of chivalry and had tried to explain his shameful father’s reasoning for his actions), he needed a way to survive this world he’d been thrown into. What was more, it seemed more of a sin at that point in his life to waste such obvious talent in something as dreary and insipid as the life of a woodsman—and really, he’d killed pigs in the forest for food before. Assassination would be no different.

Because of his high fee—he was risking his life, after all—his clientele were mostly the upper-crust of the ruling society, and his job was mainly to eliminate anyone who could endanger that position, usually top members of the bourgeoisie who could be charismatic to stage a coup d’état, bastard children and their mothers, or rivals for power.

Like any good assassin worth their weight in salt, Kakashi made sure to gather as much information as possible, whether it meant sinking money into drink after drink for one of their friends or seducing a poor unsuspecting sister or an all-too-knowing wife. They were always devastated once they found the truth, citing that their hearts were trifled with and that they thought their love was true; but a job was a job, and no one understood that better than his top client, Danzou.

Danzou, at the time, had been one of the king’s inner circle. Wanting to become chancellor to the king, he often used Kakashi’s services to edge out the competition. In hindsight, it was a miracle that no one figured out that Danzou had ordered the hits that were eliminating his competition left and right in mysterious “unfortunate accidents,” but Danzou was a genius at plotting and hiding his tracks, and it was just that sort of cunning that Kakashi could get behind.

But all good things must come to an end, and once Danzou got what he wanted, he had to erase all traces of his old life and burn the blood-stained ladder he climbed up. Kakashi was inevitably be one of those rungs on the ladder—as Danzou’s weapon of choice, he knew too much and knowledge was a dangerous thing to those in power.

So while Kakashi was off on another mission for a different client, Danzou framed him for murder and placed a bounty on his head. He’d scarcely arrived back in town before he was fleeing for his life from bounty hunters across the kingdom into the forest. It had been one of the few times in his life where he could actually say that he had been scared for his life; he could still remember the sound of his bow string vibrating as he shot arrow after arrow blindly in the forest behind him. He’d managed to pick off most of the hunters, but was unprepared when one of the hunters—he believed the name was Zabuza—had headed him off, skewering him through with his sword. As the taste of blood filled his mouth, Zabuza took the small silver necklace Minato had given to him as a birthday gift as proof and left to collect the money. Zabuza had left him there to die in the forest and Kakashi probably would’ve if he hadn’t been found by a newlywed couple who had happened upon the scene. That was when he met Obito and Rin.

Obito and Rin were from a small village at the northwestern edge of the forest. They had been childhood friends; Obito, it seemed, was part of a large, though mostly extinct clan with nothing to offer but merely a name and only enough to get by on. Still, Rin had accepted his proposal and the two married, setting off for a home closer to the capital for more work opportunities. They had scarcely been married two weeks before they had come upon a man on his deathbed, bleeding out in front of them. They did not know his name or his background and yet, they still felt compelled to help him as best they could. With Rin, who’d apprenticed under the village’s healer, they stabilized his condition. They took him into their home, nursed him back to health and asked for nothing in return, and it was the charity of these strangers that saved him.

However, he couldn’t idly sit back and let these people who saved him just allow him to stay. So he helped with the chores. As the tallest one of them, he dusted the tops of shelves and retrieved jars of roots and powders. He taught Obito how to track game and hunt; he taught Rin recipes for medicines from the castle, and he did everything he could to pay back the two who had saved his life and never even asked to know his history. When he asked why, they told him that his past didn’t matter to them; he was just one of the family now.

And at the idea of a family, of belonging to a group that obviously loved each other, Kakashi was touched beyond words and strived to help them in any way they can. Looking back, he could say that period was one of the happiest in his life.

But fate was cruel to Kakashi, and happiness was always fleeting. A few months after he was welcomed into the family with open arms, Obito was killed in a hunting accident. It was all Kakashi could do to not let Rin see the bloody, tattered remains of her husband.

They buried Obito next to the house. Once again, Kakashi was the one who dug the grave and buried his friend while Rin laid a string of daisies on the disturbed earth. After Obito’s death, it felt as if someone has sapped the oxygen from their small cottage. The light in their life was gone—Obito’s foolish, well-meaning antics would never be seen again—and the two consoled each other as best they could in a house that seemed to carry his memory everywhere.

With Obito gone, it was now up to Kakashi to provide for Rin. He took up carpentry to support them, using Obito’s old tools. Unbidden, Kakashi’s eyes flew to the carved wooden ornament hanging on the wall he made for Rin.

 _‘Rin…’_ he began, only to cut the thought off abruptly. He didn’t want to think of her now.

A year after Obito’s death, trouble began brewing again. Having gained a small following for his work, it soon leaked back to Danzou that Kakashi had not actually died in the forest. To exterminate him once and for all, Danzou sent an assassin after him. They caught him on his way to his hunting hut, ambushing him. It was here that he lost his left eye, and after the battle was over and he was pressing scraps of his shirt against his wounds that he realized that it wasn’t safe—that he had to tell Rin that they had to move because Danzou had found him.

Pulling himself back towards the house, he struggled to return home to warn Rin. She had to know. He had to get them to safety, but by the time he got to their shared cottage, the entire thing was engulfed in flames as a charred and blistered hand stuck out lifelessly from the slightly ajar door. It was too late, he realized, and he watched as the cottage collapsed on itself in an explosion of smoke, sparks, and flames.

After that, Kakashi didn’t remember much. He remembered finding the other operative who set the fire and snapping his neck so hard that Kakashi had nearly pulled his head off. He remembered stumbling back to the hunting cottage and recuperating there, making that his new home. He remembered scavenging the ashes of the cottage for salvageable items and burying the bones of his new family. He remembered packing everything in the hunting cottage for a move, all relics from his old life as Minato’s son and an assassin, and he remembered making arrangements for a house on the coast.

He would start a new life for himself, he vowed. He would put this life behind him once and for all; and with that, he uprooted his life in the forest and moved down to a small fishing village on the European coast, but not before ensuring that all his old clients had been burned. On the wagon ride down, the driver mentioned that among the rash of sudden nobility deaths, the high chancellor had been found dead in his home along with detailed documents that listed his role in a string of high-class murders as well as a report of his role in a murder for which another man was framed. The driver commented that no one in town had a clue who did it, but Kakashi knew that everyone knew. They knew because everyone had seen Kakashi’s face—knew of his work and were ready to piss their boots for fear of the retribution he’d given. The nobility were paralyzed with fear and though everyone knew that Kakashi had been the one who’d committed those murders, no one was willing to confront him. If not pursuing the matter and letting him go meant keeping their lives, then the town was willing to turn their heads.

And so, the bounty was dropped and Hatake Kakashi became a ghost on the wind.

Kakashi banged his fist against the wall of the fireplace, the sickening crack telling him he’d dislocated at least two of his joints, but he didn’t care.

He had been sure that he’d left the past behind him. He kept a low profile. He made sure to take different routes to the capital and avoid any place where someone would recognize him. He’d hidden the lower portion of his face, kept his hat pulled low over his eyes—even used a different dialect when bartering, but it proved useless in the end. Sakura still found out and the evening was ruined. When he thought about the fisherman who’d spoken that day and revealed Kakashi’s sordid past, he felt the urge to snap the man’s throat over his knee.

In a way, it was laughable how easily his ruse had been destroyed. Though he could do damage control in the morning—smile, nod, and deny his way back into good standing—those only worked in villages. Sakura was another matter entirely. To her, what she’d heard was just another facet about him. It was how she learned, absorbing what she observed before pulling everything apart to study its inner workings. She’d done the same thing with the rumor, pulling what could be true out and shaping it into a way that it’d made sense. She’d given everything as a guess—a shot in the dark—and Kakashi had every opportunity to deny it, to brush it off and sweep it back under the rug it came from, but no. Instead, he’d panicked and let his emotions show—let his mask crack and confirm all her notions being true. What’s worse was that he’d gotten angry at her when it wasn’t her fault (or at least, not entirely)—and what about him? Freezing like that when he’d been a feared assassin for a majority of his life?

He tried to dismiss it, chalked it up to shock at seeing something he’d buried so deeply rise up again to spite him, but that didn’t feel like that was it. It felt more like an excuse. Maybe it was because he’d heard it from her.

A bitter laugh escaped Kakashi’s lips, now twisted in a smirk that was half-pitying and half-mournful. After all, when he initially agreed to showing Sakura his home, he’d wanted to show her a side of him that she’d never seen—that few people ever saw. In a way, he guessed that happened tonight.

Anger began welling inside him. He felt like having a tantrum because _it wasn’t fair._ It wasn’t fair. Why did tonight turn out like this?

But maybe his expectations for the night had just been extraordinarily high? Every plan has the ability to go awry, but was a quiet night with Sakura too much? Was an evening spent discussing his book collection and the places he’d been to too much to ask? So what if he’d spent weeks fantasizing their conversations shared at the side of her basin? That the thin, frail tendrils of hope had began to coil around that picture of the two of them together in deep conversation and laughing? That he was and had been the happiest he remembered being in a while? Was that really so much to ask for?

His gaze returned to the bucket that had remained untouched for most of the night. Jaw locking, he glared at his reflection. Fate certainly had a fine way of mocking him, giving him something he wanted only to snatch away something larger.

The injustice of it all made his blood boil. Why him? He’d been good for all these years, atoned for his past life as best he could, _so why was it always him?_

The thought spun in a circle in his mind, gaining momentum and stirring his anger to new heights. The fisherman, he’d deal with in the morning, but Sakura... how would he talk to her? How would he ever look her in the eye without some form of resentment in his eyes? In his heart? How would they ever talk to one another with the shadow of tonight hanging over them like a blade ready to strike? He didn’t know what to do, what he’d do because now the dream world was over. A indelible shift had occurred in their relationship—one that they couldn’t erase—and he was now left staring at the shattered remains of happier days, unsure of how to greet the woman who had wounded his heart so fiercely tonight.

He hated this. He didn’t want to feel this way: so confused, so angry, so hurt and deceived. He didn’t want to be angry at Sakura when she knew no better, but he was. He resented her for bringing up the past he’d worked so hard to hide, and now…now he didn’t know what to think.

His head hung low against his neck, his eyes scanned the walls. Suddenly, he regretted bringing those relics of his old life. The books from Minato, his father’s old coat of arms, the wooden carving on the wall all seemed to be mocking him. Staring at the two-handed carving he’d made for Rin, he frowned; those flowers could shrivel up and turn to dust for all he cared now.

The bucket swung idly in his hand at its handle. The weight constantly shifting, he stared deep into the fire for answers, but all he found was the image of the cottage collapsing playing over and over again. The old demons had found a way out and were now playing him for all that he was worth, like a fool. Anger and outrage tasted thick and black on his tongue as the raving voice in his mind continued the tirade in his head that it wasn’t fair. It really wasn’t. It wasn’t fair. Why couldn’t tonight be perfect? Why did it have to be tonight? Why did she have to open her mouth?

Images of the cottage collapsing played behind his eyes. He couldn’t erase it, no matter how hard he tried while the bookshelf walls seemed to move in, trapping him in that hunting cottage he’d sat in as he plotted his revenge, the other time in his life when things seemed to be inextricably unfair.

 _‘It’s not fair. Things are still unfair,’_ the voice in his head ranted as his grip on the bucket became looser—swinging higher as the sound of collapsing wood and exploding sparks filled his ears. The fireplace was mocking him. This house was mocking him; he stared into the bucket, looked at his reflection. His features were hardened now, his gaze smoldering with the rage he still felt at it all. Out of the corner of his eyes, he could see his hands twisted into a white-knuckle grip on the side of the bucket and he regretted it. He regretted being able to see—regretted Sakura for giving him his eye back—and he regretted that thought as soon as he thought it, staring into his blood-red eye as the faint glow of the fire in the fireplace reflected into the water. Instantly, the collapsing cottage was playing out over his eyes as Sakura’s curious eyes stared up at him with eager adoration _and that arm. Rin’s arm…_

Kakashi watched, his body locked, as the last sparks of the fire leaped off as a last-ditch effort to survive as the bucket—previously full of sea water—clattered noisily on the stones of the fireplace, slowly spinning itself to an end. Where cold sea water met the still-intense heat of the logs, angry hissing clicks of sizzled droplets echoed into the night, chorusing in time with Kakashi’s beating heart. In the darkness of the cabin, the smell of sea water and burnt wood filled the air as salt crystals decorated the logs like grains of sugar, glistening like stars in the moonlight. His breath echoing off the walls, Kakashi drank in the sudden silence as he watched as the smoke of the fire curled towards the sky. If he listened closely enough, he could hear the sound of crickets chirping and the gentle lapping of the waves.

He stood there for a moment in the darkness, watching as the last bit of life died out in the fire, his body still tense as he listened to the faint whining sound of steam in the logs. Staring into the small huddled mass of charred wood, Kakashi listened to the last cracks and sizzles of the dying fire before finally storming off to bed for a restless night of sleep. 

* * *

Sakura waded sadly in the water, a cheek pressed against the tide pool as she waited for Kakashi’s arrival on the beach. While he was now venturing onto the beach—he hadn’t shown up the first three days after the night she went to his home—he never spoke a word to her, instead staring out at the water’s horizon. He even ignored the greetings of the boats heading out to sea, and while they had shared silence before, never had they been so cold and tense.

She supposed it was her fault—she’d obviously pried into a sensitive matter for Kakashi—and while she hadn’t known it was sensitive beforehand, she should’ve at least read the signs instead of plowing on in her own eagerness to learn more about him. As a friend, she owed him that respect—should’ve realized that she’d hurt him by prying into something that was obviously personal—and for that, she was sorry. She was truly and deeply sorry, but even then, she still had yet to apologize to him because he wasn’t talking to her and to be honest, she wasn’t quite sure how to bring it up, despite thinking it over for days.

A sad crooning sound escaped Sakura. She really missed talking to Kakashi. She never realized it before, but she liked hearing the sound of his voice. While he’d been gone for trips and she’d been fine, it was an entirely different matter to have someone in front of you and feel like they weren’t there at all. Sometimes, she wondered if he was just ignoring her, or if he actually saw her at all anymore.

The sound of sand crunching made her look up and she watched as Kakashi slowly made his way over to her with his net and pole. Swimming around the tide pool, she waited for him to cast his net and pole before clambering onto the rocks to sit beside him. Staring up at him, she decided that today was going to be the day she would apologize. No ifs, ands, or buts.

Waiting until he turned his head to look at her, she played with her flippers a little before feeling herself ready to speak. Taking in a deep breath, she began. “Kakashi,” she said feeling his eyes on her face, “about that night on the Harvest Moon…I was out of line. I shouldn’t have asked about your eye because you obviously didn’t want anyone to know, and I should’ve realized that you didn’t want to talk about it, and I hurt you and well…what I wanted to say was…well…I’m…I’m…I’m sorry, Kakashi. I really am.”

Her head was bowed, eyes shut as she awaited whatever judgment Kakashi decided to give her. And though she hoped he forgave her, if he didn’t—if he didn’t want to talk to her anymore, wanted nothing to do with her anymore, then she would understand. Even if she didn’t want to be apart from him, she would do her best to comply because well…she owed him that much, right?

The different permutations of reply spun in her head—that he would laugh at her, that he would become even angrier, that he wouldn’t talk to her. She was so sure that he would react negatively…

So imagine her response when Kakashi sighed and raked a hand through his hair anxiously.

“No, I’m sorry. This would’ve never happened if I had been more honest with you about my past,” Kakashi told her softly. “I should’ve never protected you from it,” he said with an affectionate rub on her head. Sakura merely smiled and leaned into the embrace, all too happy that he was talking to her again. She’d missed this.

“I missed you too,” Kakashi said with a fond smile, making Sakura wonder if she’d said that out loud as her cheeks colored prettily under her fur. Kakashi, on the other hand, moved his hand lower to stroke the curve of her neck. “I’m sorry for being angry with you. I just…didn’t know what to say.”

“It’s alright,” Sakura said with a small flush on her face. In the back of her mind, she wondered how visible blushing was under fur.

“No, it isn’t,” said Kakashi. “I was being childish and you didn’t deserve that from me. Just like how you deserved me being honest with you. You’ve told me everything about yourself and I haven’t told you a thing. And if you don’t mind, I’d like to change that.”

And with that, Kakashi began to tell her of his parents, the sound of the waves mixing into his story. 

* * *

 

Sakura smiled to herself as she relaxed in the waves, letting the current carry her gently in the water as she hummed a happy forest song Kakashi had taught her last month. Though it had been almost a year since Kakashi told her the story of his past, the novelty had not worn off and Sakura was still overjoyed that Kakashi had shared his past with her. The fact that she was one of the few people who knew made her feel even more special.

In the back of her mind, she recounted the details of the story for the nth time. Since they made up last year, Kakashi had been talking to her just as easily as before and they continued to talk endlessly about everything, though Sakura usually steered the conversation back to his past to learn more about the people who shaped him to be who he was today. Having few memories of his real parents, he would talk about Minato and Obito instead. She noticed that Rin was seldom brought up in their conversations, but figured it was due to a lack of interesting things to say about the girl. Even so, she was content to listen to Kakashi talk about his old friends who he obviously loved dearly.

 _‘I’m happy,’_ she thought to herself with a fond smile. That Kakashi trusted her to that extent made her heart sing, and briefly, she wondered if that made her special in his eyes.

Just then, she saw two women on the shore and curious, she decided to investigate—women rarely came onto the beach at this time of day—only to find them sunning their laundry on the rocks on the beach. Bored, she began to head back to deeper water when she heard one woman ask, “So Kakashi will be coming home later tonight?”

Suddenly, Sakura’s interest was piqued again. These women seemed to know of Kakashi’s trip to the capital also, and they seemed to know the time of day that he was due to return (something Sakura never knew about). In the back of her mind, she realized she was eavesdropping on gossip and decided that despite Kakashi’s distaste towards the subject, if it helped Sakura, gossip could not be all bad.

“Yes, the vendor who sells glass bottles saw him on his way to the village and Kakashi mentioned he’d return later tonight,” replied the second woman.

“Seems like he’s taking longer than usual. He’s usually back by mid-afternoon.”

“Well, apparently he’s waiting until later to return because of the heat. He’s buying flowers and he doesn’t want them to wilt on his return.”

“Flowers? What kind of flowers?” the first woman asked, curious. Sakura felt the same way.

“Well, we have cypress trees, laurestine, heliotropes, and rosemary already, so he’s going into town for snow drops and globe amaranths,” the second woman replied.

The first woman gasped. “Aren’t those flowers usually for mourning the death of a lover?”

“Yes, but he needed to replace the flowers at the altar for his dead wife and child.”

The topic soon turned to how the second woman’s sister lived in the area Kakashi had come from and that’s how she knew, but Sakura couldn’t pay attention to that as five words continued to ring in her ear: His dead wife and child. _His dead wife and child._ He’d never mentioned that before. Never mentioned to her that he once had a wife and family. Why hadn’t he said anything to her?

Unbidden, her mind traced the roots of his story, searching for a clue. She followed every route she could find, only to find dead ends. Minato died too early to have a child of his own; his own parents were only children; and Obito’s clan was left with only males by the time that they departed, leaving Sakura with Rin, but that didn’t make sense because the image in her mind of the woman was vague—had always been vague because Kakashi never seemed to want to talk about her. It couldn’t possibly be Rin that had been his wife.

But by the time the denial had crossed her mind, she already knew. She knew that it was true; that Rin had been his wife and that they had been in love and that they had a child and that was why Kakashi never spoke about her. That was why he always hesitated when he talked about the cottage fire; why there was always that brief pause when he talked about meeting his two saviors in the forest; why there was a fond look in his eye when he talked about the chores in the cottage. It was Rin, she knew deep inside herself. Kakashi had been in love with Rin.

Wind began to howl fiercely in Sakura’s ears. She was venturing further out of the cove—a suicidal move as the curse began to activate and a storm started to churn the water around her—but her grief was too painful to make her care anything towards her personal safety. The pain in her chest was unbearable. She felt betrayed, hurt, deceived—but at what? She had no right to be angry. Kakashi wasn’t hers to begin with after all—never had been even if he had spent almost every day with her for the past six years and let her into his home and his past. Had it been wrong of her to believe she was special to him, she wondered. Had she ever been special, she asked herself, and if not, did she just imagine everything then? Had she spent this entire time dreaming up a relationship that simply wasn’t there?

Unbidden, an image of Kakashi and Rin happily sharing a kiss crossed her mind; her pained bark echoed through the cove.

It hurt. _It hurt._ It hurt so much. It hurt to swim, it hurt to breathe. She wanted nothing more than to go disappear—to just go away where she’d never have to see or hear of Kakashi again. She wanted to go home.

Suddenly, her wandering had a purpose and she began to swim north towards the shore. Pulling her head up from the water, she shouted. “Anko! Anko!”

In a wisp of black smoke, the sea witch appeared, reclining comfortably on a rock as if there wasn’t a large storm whipping the forest around her. “You rang, my dear?”

At the woman’s cool tone, Sakura gnashed her teeth. “Change me back. You put this curse on me, you can take it off. I’ll do anything. Just change me back. I want to go home!” she sobbed into the churning sea.

Anko, perched neatly atop her rock, merely stared down like a cat that suddenly had a very interesting toy to play with. Sakura was miserable. Anko didn’t know how it happened or what caused it, but she wasn’t the type to look a gift horse in the mouth. She sensed this was a good opportunity for revenge, and she wasn’t just about to let it pass. Putting her best mothering face, she looked down at the girl sadly and cooed.

“My poor dear, of course!” she said as cupping Sakura’s face in her hand, lowered by a wave that hovered just over the seal-girl. “But let’s not talk out here. There’s a storm brewing on the horizon. Let’s go talk in my cabin where it’s more comfortable.”

Before Sakura even knew what had happened, she suddenly found herself on a wooden floor in a darkly-lit room as Anko looked out the window and clucked her tongue distastefully at the weather outside her window. “Would you like something to drink?” she asked. Sakura merely blinked and wondered if this was the same woman who had cursed her all those years ago.

“Umm…no thank you,” Sakura answered quietly. Anko merely shrugged her shoulders as if pitying the girl for her decision before whipping up a cup of tea and sitting down at her main table. Stirring her spoon and sitting above her with such a superior air, Sakura suddenly wished she had accepted the tea if only to busy her hands—flippers—and feel less like a child.

Taking a brief sip, Anko wrinkled her nose in distaste before sprinkling something into her cup. Too dark.

“Sakura, I will do all in my power to help you—I believe I have punished you enough, and after being in my relative care for six years, you’re like a daughter to me now—but I’m a busy sea witch, after all, and I don’t like to use magic when I have no reason to, so if you wouldn’t mind…why the sudden change of heart? Why are you only invoking my name to change you back now?”

At the question, Sakura shrank into herself and tried not to let her gaze stray beyond the dark-haired woman in front of her as she lied. “I just wanted to go home. I haven’t seen my parents in so long and I miss my friends and family,” she said with a small shrug of her shoulders. Anko frowned imperceptibly and merely stirred her tea again, taking a sip.

“While it seemed like a trivial reason to me—I’ve been alone all my life and you don’t see _me_ complaining—I will do my best to help you. However, you must understand that undoing a curse requires strong magic. I will be hard at work trying to prepare the necessary potions, but I need to be sure that you want to change back into a mermaid. Do you want your old form back?”

“Yes!” Sakura shouted desperately, the most emotion she’d shown to Anko all evening.

“Do you want to leave this cove?”

“Yes!”

“And will you do anything to turn back?”

“Yes!”

“Do you swear on the moon? The stars? Neptune and the seven seas?”

“Yes. Yes! I swear by all those things. I’ll do anything! Anything! Just turn me back, _please,”_ Sakura pleaded.

At her answer, Anko smiled and smoothly left her chair to be eye-level with Sakura, patting her head.

“Alright then,” said Anko with a smooth, satin voice before standing up, her cloak whirling behind her. “I’ll begin work on the necessary potions, but this spell requires something from you. Rather, you need to do something to make the spell permanent,” she said as she began to pour powders and roots into a mortar.

“What…kind of thing?” Sakura asked warily.

Anko let out a sharp, barking laugh. “I’m glad you asked,” she said with a devious turn of the head that made Sakura shudder. “It’s nothing much. I simply need you to eat the liver of the man you love.”

“T-the man I love?” Sakura asked. Immediately, an image of Kakashi flashed before her eyes.

“Yes. That shouldn’t too hard, right? You’re always hanging out with that fisherman on the beach, after all. And before you say otherwise, it _must_ be the man you love, or else the spell won’t work and you’ll be stuck a seal forever. And don’t try and deny your feelings for him. I see everything, Sakura. I know you like him,” she said with a dark, teasing smile as she mixed a bright-colored liquid with the powder.

Suddenly, Sakura was having doubts. “I don’t…I don’t know. I don’t feel comfortable with this…”

Almost as quickly as she said it, Sakura began to regret the words that had escaped from her mouth as the glass vials in Anko’s hands shattered with a sharp, piercing “crack,” blood dripping down the palms of her hands to stain the wooden desk by the window.

 _“What?”_ she growled with a turn of her head and savage gnashing on her teeth.

“I just don’t think—”

“You just don’t think ‘what?’” Anko began to step towards her. A piece of glass in her hand fell out, landing in a droplet of blood on the floor. “You don’t think my time is worth anything? Even when I have taken time out of my busy schedule—for you. _For you!_ —to help you in your hour of need?”

Sakura’s eyes widened. “It’s not that. I just—”

Another step. “You what? Didn’t you say you wanted to be a mermaid? Didn’t you swear that you did?”

“I did, but--!”

Another step. “And didn’t you say that you’d do anything to become a mermaid again? Didn’t you swear that you would?”

“But--!”

“‘But’ what? I am giving you your old life back. I didn’t have to listen to your pleading—I could’ve just left you out in that water to drown in your miserable, pitiful sorrows—but I did. I am offering to help you—you, the offspring of the man who killed my master—and you dare back out on me now?”

Sakura shook her head. “It’s not that. I just—”

“You just what?! You don’t care about being a mermaid anymore?” Anko asked with disgust.

“No.”

“You don’t want to go back to the ocean anymore—?”

“No!”

 “That you love a pathetic human more than your family enough to sacrifice this chance—?”

_“No!”_

Anko cackled. “Then what are you waiting for? Go out and kill him. Eat his liver and you’ll be a mermaid forever again!”

“Fine!” Sakura shouted as Anko began to work at her desk with a new fervor. Liquids and powders, dried lizards and snake heads all began to go into one vile. Shaking it up, Anko poured the bright blue liquid into a vial and passed it to the girl.

“Drink this,” she told the girl. “For exactly one week, plus the harvest moon, it’ll allow you to walk on land and live as a human to complete your mission. Fail however…”

An ornate dagger was suddenly plunged into the table, its hilt jutting from the wooden surface as Anko smiled behind it. “If you can’t seduce the fisherman and eat his liver in the allotted time, I will kill you with this knife. You forfeit your life to me, and your soul is mine,” explained the sea witch, a predatory grin on her lips. “Do we have a deal?”

Sakura bit her lip in hesitation as she stared between the knife on the table and the vial in her flippers. Even as Anko told her to think of the dagger as added motivation for getting the job done, this felt wrong. She just wanted to leave this cove. She didn’t want to hurt anyone. Helpless, she turned to Anko who merely shrugged.

“You swore to the sea. It’s either you or him now,” she answered calmly with a sinuous shrug of her shoulders.

It was true. She’d invoked the stars, the moon, and the sea. She had to go through with it or risk death the next time she entered the water. By now, the pain of Kakashi’s betrayal had settled, twisting and turning itself into a malicious lump of jealousy and resentment in her chest as her mind begged to know why…why he never told her the truth. Did he think she was too young? That she wouldn’t understand? Or was it merely because he didn’t think she warranted an explanation, as a woman or a friend. To that kind of treatment on land, the ocean seemed like a salve for her wounds. Home was beckoning to her, a place far away from this accursed fishing village on the European coast. Though her heart hurt now, she could learn to forget about the man she loved. She’d move on. Sakura would make sure of that. However…

“How am I to be sure that you’ll keep your word? You cursed me once. What’s to stop you from just turning on your promises and killing me?” Sakura asked, eyeing the sea witch suspiciously.

Anko raised her brows slightly as a contemptuous smirk graced her lips. The girl was smarter than she gave her credit for. “Fine. I swear that I, Anko, will keep my word to the mermaid, Sakura.”

“Swear on the ocean?” Sakura asked.

Anko smiled and placed one hand over her heart, raising the other one with a slight flourish. “Swear by the very ocean that grants me my powers,” she replied, calling upon the highest oath of their kind—not that it really mattered much. The foolish seal-girl was as good as hers.

Unaware of Anko’s treacherous thoughts however, Sakura lessened the intensity of her critical eye—she’d sworn on the ocean, the source of her power. To defy that was assured-death—and turned to the bright-blue liquid calling to her. Regret and doubt began to prick at her mind—did she really want to do this…?

But the urge to flee was greater than anything else she felt, and with a flick of her wrists, Sakura poured the liquid down her throat. 

A white light exploded before her eyes, enveloping her as intense heat seared her bones. In the back of her mind, she recalled a similar sensation from when she was first cursed before she felt the bloody wet sensation of her tail cleaving into two legs and her core explode into a fit of pain.

* * *

Kakashi braced his hat against the gusting wind. It was late. The stars—what few he could see—were now high in the sky, signaling night had fallen for the day. He was three hours past when he had been due to arrive, slowed down by the sudden storm. In the back of his mind, he wondered if the cove’s luck had finally run out for perfect weather conditions.

The trees began to thin the closer he got to the village. Dropping off his things at home, he went to the stables to return the horse he’d rented. He’d barely transferred the reins to the stable hand when he ran into Genma.

“Mayor’s put the village on storm alert. Batten down anything you don’t want to fly away,” Genma said passing on the information.

Kakashi nodded. “Thanks for the warning,” he replied, already making a checklist of what he’d need to tie down in his backyard. Genma nodded in acknowledgment, the same look of concentration on his face as he seemed to do the same in his mind.

“I just hope the seal is okay.”

“Sakura will be just fine,” Kakashi reassured. Genma, hearing this from the seal’s confidante, seemed to relax a little.

“I guess. She does live in the water all the time. Maybe she swam away after she sensed the storm,” Genma wondered.

“What do you mean?” Kakashi asked, brows knit in confusion.

“No one’s seen the seal all night. The last time anyone saw it, it was swimming towards the mouth of the cove.”

And that was the last thing Kakashi heard before he bolted into the storm towards the beach. 

* * *

The first thing Sakura realized when she opened her eyes, was that it was cold. Night had fallen; she could tell by the color of the water around her, a dark purple-blue the color of blueberry skins and crushed violets. The final ebbs of pain were going away and gingerly, she picked herself out of the shallow she’d seemed to have landed in. At last memory, she was in Anko’s cottage. Now, it seemed that she had appeared on the beach of the cove. Glancing up, she could see the stars peeking through the fading, wispy streaks of storm clouds disappearing slowly in the sky. They were lovely.

A breeze blew over her, sending shivers over her skin and her pink hair into her field of vision. Looking down, she found she had legs again and wiggled her toes experimentally in the sand, nostalgia washing over her as she did so. How long had it been since she had legs?

She looked over the rest of her body, her skin stark white in the moonlight as her green eyes traced over her long legs, the darker-pink hair at the apex of her thighs, the flat of her stomach. Another breeze blew and she rubbed warmth back into her arms with her small hands, the nails on her long, tapered fingers glowing slightly in the moonlight as water dripped down the small of her back from her wet hair. In the back of her mind, she made a note to cut it again.

Her limbs and appendages working, Sakura peered into the water to stare at her figure. It was so strange staring at her new form. Though she knew this was her new body—that this form was to be the new Sakura—it felt so surreal after so many years as a seal. Even as a mermaid, with her top-half human, it was a strange sight to see because it had been so long since she’d seen it without the transformative powers of the Harvest Moon.

Raising a hand, she gently touched her cheek, watching as bright beryl-green eyes stared back at her. Her skin still felt cold from the water, her hair creating a slight echoing effect as drops of water fell back into the ocean beneath her. Despite her disbelief, it was true. Anko’s magic had worked. She was a human now.

The sound of rustling leaves and snapping branches alerted her to the sound of an intruder. They were breathing heavily—they must have run from somewhere far because she could hear their heartbeat clearly—and she wondered who the person was, if they were friend or foe.

“Sakura…?” the voice asked and gracefully standing up on her two new legs, she turned her head towards the beach, the water still glistening on her hair and skin as their eyes met.

For there, standing breathlessly with his chest heaving on the beach, was Kakashi.


End file.
